The keys to suc­cess­ful doc­u­men­ta­tion are plan­ning and effi­ciency. A mutual under­stand­ing of the final prod­uct, a sched­ule, adher­ence to both inter­nal and com­mer­cial stan­dards, use of state-of-the-art hard­ware and soft­ware, and coör­di­na­tion of all the play­ers in the doc­u­men­ta­tion arena are per­ti­nent to the suc­cess of your project.

At Beyond Print, we have cre­ated an effec­tive sys­tem to ensure that you receive an excel­lent prod­uct. We have designed a project plan­ning sur­vey that will ensure that we (Beyond Print and you, our client) are lit­er­ally on the same page every step of the project.

Before work begins, we encour­age our clients to com­plete this project plan­ning sur­vey that addresses the fol­low­ing impor­tant aspects of the doc­u­men­ta­tion process:

• Your Needs
  • Schedules/Deadlines
  • Resources
  • Purpose/Audience
  • Doc­u­men­ta­tion Experience
  • Expec­ta­tions
  • Publishing/Deployment Plan
• Look and Feel
  • Page Lay­out
  • Color Def­i­n­i­tions
  • Doc­u­ment Styles (Paragraph/Character Formats)
  • Table For­mats and Usage
  • Auto­mated Doc­u­ment Features
  • Graph­ics Definitions
• Tech­ni­cal Specifications
  • Graph­ics Standards
  • User Pref­er­ence Set­tings in FrameMaker
  • Pub­lish­ing Options/Requirements
  • Hard­ware Con­fig­u­ra­tion Requirements

This sur­vey will iden­tify impor­tant cri­te­ria for the end prod­uct to meet, as well as any client sched­ul­ing issues or con­cerns. Clients also are asked to pro­vide a copy of their cor­po­rate style guide for doc­u­men­ta­tion, if one exists, or to select an exist­ing style guide to be fol­lowed (i.e., the Chicago Man­ual of Style).

Why FrameMaker?

We encour­age the use of FrameMaker for most doc­u­men­ta­tion projects. FrameMaker was designed with the entire pub­lish­ing process in mind; most word proces­sors were built to send small files to laser print­ers, not print­ing presses. To that end, FrameMaker is not a reg­u­lar word proces­sor; it is a doc­u­ment pub­lish­ing soft­ware pack­age that incor­po­rates the pub­lish­ing indus­try stan­dards into its final prod­uct, to make pro­duc­tion effi­cient and error-free. Because FrameMaker is a spe­cial­ized soft­ware appli­ca­tion designed specif­i­cally for doc­u­men­ta­tion and pub­lish­ing projects, it is more effi­cient than gen­eral word pro­cess­ing applications.

Our Expe­ri­ence

We have sent tens of thou­sands of pages of doc­u­men­ta­tion to press, and have dis­cov­ered that a seam­less pub­lish­ing (and an error-free) project begins with sta­ble files. With our unique inter­nal process we are able to assist in bring­ing your project to press– stress free!

Our Meth­ods

Regard­less of whether you want to deliver your doc­u­ments in print or online, we fol­low the same basic pro­ce­dure for pro­duc­ing your source files. We start with a clean, sta­ble, well-planned tem­plate. Then we cre­ate your source files, ensur­ing that any imported files (i.e., graph­ics) are inserted prop­erly. Finally, we cre­ate a PDF using the fol­low­ing 2-step procedure:

• Cre­ate a Post­Script file from the source file
• Dis­till the Post­Script file into a PDF file

Once the PDF file is cre­ated, it can be sent to print on a laser printer in the office or on a press in a shop, or it can be pub­lished online for peo­ple to view or download.