Our company has a 3600+ page manual for a software program that has been around for 30+ years. The software product is very antiquated - in fact, it's mostly a text-based program. Users navigate to the different areas of the program by typing in menu numbers, which is listed on the screen. Originally, the manual was organized by these menu numbers, but our new customers had a hard time finding information. A few years ago we reorganized the topics to be task-based, but we have some experienced users as well as our support staff that still want to be able to look at a list of the topics organized by menu number. In our last release, I did this all manually by printing a list of all the headings and their corresponding menu numbers, and added them as cross-reference links in the back of the manual. This took over a week and was a major pain.
Obviously, from a maintenance perspective, it's a nightmare. Is there any way that I can automate this process by using an index or modified TOC to do this? If so, what would be the best way to go about setting this up?
We are using unstructured FrameMaker 10 on Windows 8.1.
Thanks!
Jodie