Manual Designing and DTP

To function well, manuals must be accurate, easy to understand, and easy to use. As pioneers of technical writing for manuals, we have been focusing on these themes at Abeism since before technical writing was recognized as an occupation. The manuals we produce at Abeism are highly ranked by numerous customers for their optimal organization of content, excellent searchability, and user-friendly explanations. Our instruction manuals, which we design and produce at Abeism, have won multiple awards at the Japan Manual Awards sponsored by the Japan Technical Communicators Association, indicating our high position in the industry.

Technical writers must have high-level technical knowledge in each product’s field. This is especially important for those handling service manuals. At Abeism, our technical writers are constantly deepening their technical knowledge in both the automotive and electronics fields. They also thoroughly research technical information and study design materials to do technical writing and to produce manuals.

At Abeism, we were aware early on of the importance of software systems to standardize the production and designing of manuals. The ToDoX document design support system that we developed at Abeism allows us to convert documents to XML and manage the data effectively in an organized hierarchical structure. The document data is placed on a server and any required information can be accessed and edited by a specialized editing application installed on client computers. This increases accuracy by allowing editors to use the same terminology and content structure for each series of products and to reflect product specifications and edited data into all relevant areas. ToDoX can be used for Japanese and for localization to English and other languages.

In addition to the accurate translation of terminology, translating manuals also requires elements of technical writing. To create manuals for the world’s many languages, we must start with an accurate English manual. This manual acts as the base that is localized into multiple other languages. Technical writing of English instruction manuals is done by our technical writers writing directly in English or by using a translation of the Japanese manual as the base for English technical writing. To raise our quality at Abeism, this work is done by native translators on our staff who work cooperatively with our English technical writers.

We use InDesign, Illustrator, FrameMaker, and other DTP systems to produce manuals according to the targeted finished product. The data we use during the manual production process is edited several times. We can also create manuals based on a previous version of the data. As part of our BCP measures at Abeism, we have installed massive volume servers at our Yokohama Operating Center and Chubu Operating Center. These are linked through our in-house network, so we can maintain mutual backups as we manage data according to our standardized rules.