Re: repost screen dumps in books

[Max Wyss <prodok -at- PRODOK -dot- CH>]

Sean,

I had that issue quite a few times in the past.

First, who says that the screendump should be exactly the same size as the
view on the monitor?

When I had that problem, the body text was 11 or 12 pt, but the screenshots
were 8 or 9 pt. Then it fits easily on a portrait formatted A4 sheet. Well,
that worked well for the 80 character screens. For the very few cases where
they had the 132 character screen (or for displaying paper output), I used
a specially squeezed version of the fixed sized font. This worked pretty
well.

Hope, this can help.

Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Technical documentation and translations, Electronic Publishing
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland

Fax:  +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail:  mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch
WWW:  http://www.prodok.ch/prodok


Bridging the Knowledge Gap


______________________



>Hallo:
>
>Anyone have any thoughts on the best way to handle the following?
>
>I am writing s/w release notes for VAX/VMS-based software. One of the
>items that programming wants is numerous screen dumps written into the
>release notes. By screen dump, I mean one or more screen of textual
>information, some of which are prompts at which the user types a
>response.
>
>I am used to writing for Macs and Windows machines. In these
>environments I am loathe to reproduce screens in my documentation
>without great reason. I see little need for it. In the VAX/VMS software,
>it is pretty clear that the screen dumps must stay. I format them in
>Courier to mimic the fixed-width font the user sees and to provide a
>visual clue that this is not regular text. However, that is not enough.
>Programming wants the lines to wrap and align as they do on the user's
>terminal.
>
>I explained that the 4:3 width:height ratio of the screen made it
>ill-suited for reproduction on an 8 x 10 (after conservative margins)
>sheet. I offered to make the book landscape but that approach is not
>what anyone is looking for. I described that printed material did not
>lend itself well to the layout seen on-screen, including the use of
>both, attention span, idea that 4-inch line width may be an optimal
>target, etc. All very traditional.
>
>
>Thanks.
>
>Sean

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