ABSTRACT
The first edition of this book back in 1984 was titled Writing and Designing Manuals because at that time those were two separate functions performed by different people. Back then, the norm was that writers wrote text, illustrators drew art, and designers-sometimes called “pasteup artists”—put the two together into page layouts. Indeed, the designers often literally “pasted up” page layouts, cutting “camera-ready” printed text and art with a razor blade or an X-Acto®* knife and fitting it together on a “mechanical,” which then was photographically reproduced for printing. Photographs, or “continuous-tone” art, had to be shot through a screen that converted the image to black dots of various sizes and spacings. The viewer’s eye then would merge the dots and see them as shades of grey, the same way our eyes blend dots of color in an Impressionist painting. A published manual represented the combined efforts of a crew of specialists.
