Titles, product names and headings, when they are sorted in a “list” format in user manual documents, usually need be arranged according to some certain orders. In English documents, they are often sorted in an alphabetical order. So what about Chinese documents?

I dig out the manuals for the Air Conditioner and TV set at my home, and took a close study on the arrangement/sorting of all their titles and subtitles. 

Let's take my Air Conditioner as an example:

It's a local brand (CHONGHONG) product and a typical made-in-China home appliance widely sold across the country. Its user manual is originally compiled in Chinese, not a translation from any "English version". So how did the manufacturer arrange the the titles for the sections and sub-sections in their little booklet? It's neither in alphabetic order nor the "stroke-number" order, instead, it's in "logic" order. 

The case is similar with my TV set's user manual. 

Actually, for most of the time, people (at least we people here in China) won't even notice in what order the titles are arranged - they just quickly browse and find out the Characters/words they are looking for. Things might be different in the West because the alphabetic order is so easy to follow when you are trying to locate a Romanic word. Things are different in the East. When we need to find some information in a booklet, we usually "scan" the Table of Contents, without even thinking of "following some certain order". If I did not work on a project that requires “sorting” or these titles/headings, even I myself wouldn’t have "noticed" that we could pay attention to the arrangement of these titles. 

Of course this doesn't mean "these is totally no order" in Chinese documents. We are translators/DTP specialists and we have our own orders to follow. Our own order is that the arrangement needs to be consistent and read natural. In this case, I would suggest we use alphabetic order based on the pronunciations of the Chinese characters (or you can say the Pin Yin system).