Consistency of a technical documentation is what creates that subliminal sense of trust and confidence in the end-users.
Someone once quipped: "it ain't technical documentation if it ain't boring." This of course is not literally true since I always found technical documents very interesting indeed.
However, this quip reflects the truth that a technical document must be "boringly consistent" in order to be taken seriously. I could also say "religiously consistent" as the phrase goes, but I thought I might inadvertently offend someone and that certainly is not my intention here.
Just ask yourself: would you trust an airplane maintenance manual that has missing page numbers, has chapter headings printed in different fonts and sizes, has differently formatted figure captions for consecutively printed figures (like "Figure 2-14" on one page, and "FIGURE 15" on next)?
Consistency all starts with a document TEMPLATE.
It is harder to shift between different page templates if you are using MS Word as your main text editing program, and much easier if you are using Framemaker or InDesign since the last two are built on the "Master Pages" concept. But a page template is what you definitely must have.
When you have a template, you have consistent margins, sidebars, headers and footers, for starters. You have consistent page numbering and column, and page gutter(s) if you have more than one column.
If your text editor allows you to create Master Pages, I'd recommend you to create a document template starting off with the following 5 types of pages (assuming you are writing a book):
1) Front Cover.
2) First Page.
3) Right Page.
4) Left Page.
5) Back Cover.
And it wouldn't hurt at all of you design templates (Master Pages) for the following types of special pages as well:
6) Front Matter.
7) TOC.
8) List of Tables and Figures.
9) Index.
Have a template first before structuring your information. It's a must. "Don't leave home without it," as one credit card commercial used to say.
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