Linking to Handbooks and Manuals

The information on this page is designed to help you add effective and usable links to handbooks and manuals on your web page. All staff and contractors who develop content for web pages or applications for FAA websites must follow these standards.

• Basic Guidelines
• Examples

Basic Guidelines

• Your handbook or manual must be in at least one of the following formats. If possible, offer your publication in more than one format to reach the widest audience.
  • Adobe Acrobat PDF
  • HTML
  • EPUB (iPad and other mobile devices)
  • MOBI (Kindle)
• Your handbook or manual must have metadata assigned in the file. For PDF, the metadata is located in the Document Properties – Description tab. For instructions, see Optimizing Content for Search Results.
• If want to link to individual chapter files, create an additional single-file version that contains all chapters. FAA.gov users frequently want to download single-file versions to save time.
• The link to your handbook or manual must show the following criteria:
  • Title of handbook or manual, with official Change numbers if applicable
  • Chapter title, if applicable. If the chapter does not have a title, include a description. See Examples.
  • Publication date
  • File format
  • File size (if greater than 1 MB)

  Note to Developers: Specifying the criteria above is easy to do using the documentViewer function in the standard FAA.gov template; for instructions, see the Public Site Toolkit (login required).

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Examples

Following are examples of correct and incorrect links to handbooks and manuals.

For more examples, see Instrument Procedures Handbook and Air Traffic Plans and Publications.

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