The Manuals Machine - Types of Content

The Manuals Machine organises content in the way that you're very familiar with - a book-like structure. We call each book a Volume, and Volumes live in Libraries. You use Volumes like you use physical books and bound sets of internal business documentation. Each Volume can have a Table of Contents and an Alpha Index, just like a good reference books.

You'll find more about Volumes under The Reader. Here we introduce you to the many types of content that The Manuals Machine can store and organise for you.

The 'pages' in the Volume can you can include any type of content that can be shown by a web browser using its inbuilt capabilities or using plug-ins that you have installed.

These content types can include:

  • JPGs, PNGs and other image files
  • ASCII text files
  • TIFFs, fax files and scanned materials
  • PDFs
  • HTML pages - which could be included in the Volume or could be external pages on intranet or anywhere on the world-wide web
  • any XML document type - including business documents such as purchase orders, or technical content such as product specifications

To view these XML document types in clear form, suitable stylesheets must be available. These could be stored in the Volume, or could be anywhere on the world-wide web and accessed on demand.
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More Examples

The Manuals Machine provides a Standard Document Type that can be used for business and technical documentation, with pages that look very similar to what you can prepare using a wordprocessor.  You can use the Author/Editor to prepare these content pages, that have the familiar look-and-feel of material written using Microsoft Word.

Any page, whatever its type, can be organised and accessed via the Table-of-Contents and the Alpha Index. (There are other indexes too, but we won't go into these here). You could download product PDFs from your software or equipment supplier, and organise these into a Volume to which add your own notes and commentary using pages that you develop with the Manuals Machine Author/Editor.


Look-and-feel of Pages Authored using The Manuals Machine