David McDermit 

From what I know there is no compact description of this kind. And unfortunately, my experience shows, that attempting this is a fight with windmills. I have tried to show some customers in person the effects bad formatting have on the final product to no avail. Even the argument of cost saving due to achieving more matches when the sentences would have been merged already in source did not help. The person creating documentation simply told, that no one other complains about the formatting... And the most common argument is, that "we're doing so for years, so it cannot be that wrong as you say".

I wish you luck in educating your authors and offer help, if you think I can be of any use in your process to convince customer to do better document preparation....

Jerzy Czopik 

I am guessing this will be the typical response.

If no such document already exists, and depending on what info get here, I would be willing to compile what is posted here for do's and don't that might be of some possible use.  If anything there are always new clients/new creators might be able to reach.

David McDermit 

I'd like to point out some important aspects then:

• Leave pages half-empty, some language pairs have or may an increase of text length of over 50%, like German into French for example
• Place pictures beside the text, not under or above. This makes sure, that the description AND the picture will remain on the same page.
• or
• Create layout that way, that text and picture are always on opposite pages, which are opened together. Like text on the left page of the book and picture on right page. If you create landscape layout place the picture on the left page and the text on the right page. This way, when turned to readable position the pictures will always remain above the text.
• Never break sentences by a hard return!
• Do not create tables using tabulator.
• Do not use tabs and spaces to layout the text. There are always special functions for indents etc.
• Do not create new pages by pressing enter many times. Use the available options for keeping paragraphs together or separating them by certain measure. Use formatting styles, NEVER format the document manually.
• Do not apply other font over the existing one without changing the corresponding style.
• Use paragraph AND character styles. This will allow much faster adaptation of your layout.
• NEVER place list elements between the beginning and the end of the sentence. This applies especially to German language, where often the last word like "werden" etc. is placed BELOW the list.
• ...

I will try to add other points as they come to my mind.

Thank you very much for starting this very important topic here. Let's hope we can make our world a little bit better this way in 2023

David McDermit 

I'd like to point out some important aspects then:

• Leave pages half-empty, some language pairs have or may an increase of text length of over 50%, like German into French for example
• Place pictures beside the text, not under or above. This makes sure, that the description AND the picture will remain on the same page.
• or
• Create layout that way, that text and picture are always on opposite pages, which are opened together. Like text on the left page of the book and picture on right page. If you create landscape layout place the picture on the left page and the text on the right page. This way, when turned to readable position the pictures will always remain above the text.
• Never break sentences by a hard return!
• Do not create tables using tabulator.
• Do not use tabs and spaces to layout the text. There are always special functions for indents etc.
• Do not create new pages by pressing enter many times. Use the available options for keeping paragraphs together or separating them by certain measure. Use formatting styles, NEVER format the document manually.
• Do not apply other font over the existing one without changing the corresponding style.
• Use paragraph AND character styles. This will allow much faster adaptation of your layout.
• NEVER place list elements between the beginning and the end of the sentence. This applies especially to German language, where often the last word like "werden" etc. is placed BELOW the list.
• ...

I will try to add other points as they come to my mind.

Thank you very much for starting this very important topic here. Let's hope we can make our world a little bit better this way in 2023