Production is the process that transforms your completed draft of the communication product into a form that can be used by readers. For example, production is the process that turns a draft of a user’s guide into a bound, printed guide and the process that turns a group of word processing files into Help for an application. During this phase, you focus on the practical details of publishing an communication product. Because the information and the way you present it should already be firm, your focus at this time is on the details of publishing: making sure that all of the spellings are correct, that all of the page and screen identifiers appear in the proper place, and that each diskette in a software package has a unique label.

In some cases, information developers have responsibility for producing information documents but in most cases, someone else handles this responsibility for us. However, because the people who produce our work often rely on the word processing files that we create and the instructions we provide, the more we understand about the production process, the better we can help them support us.

Specifically, you should be aware of:

The steps in the production process

1. (next) Prepare the components of a communication product for production
2. Prepare the master copy
3. Duplicate the master copy
4. Distribute the communication product to users

The role of tools, such as word processing and authoring systems, as well as word processing techniques you can use to simplify the production process no matter what medium used for your communication product

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