Page Structure and How It Aids Reading
Chapter 3 covered crafting better words to help people understand what you want to explain. Have you ever attempted to read and understand something complex to be faced with a solid wall of text that’s hard to parse to the point where your eyes stop processing any potentially fantastic information?
Crafting the perfect words is a waste of time if you make it extremely hard for anyone to read them. Thankfully, the principles of good layout for print and web-based output are well established, and documentarians can learn much from them to improve their content layout. In addition to these time-honored principles, there are a couple of other documentation and technical writing-specific tips worth considering, making things easier for your readers.
This chapter covers the following main topics:
- Humans are not your only readers
- The principles of good layout
- A primer on markup languages for the web
- Thinking about pages...
