Applying a Wrong Style? No Way

What I personally like about DITA is the inability to format something with a wrong style. Put simply – you just can’t mess up the styles! In fact, when you add a new element (such as the “to do” statement or a new step in a procedure), the right style is applied automatically. Taking it one step further, even you if applied the wrong style manually, it will exist only until you close the file. nimbus cloud .…

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What Decision Makers Will Like about DITA: DITA reduces the costs of creating and maintaining documentation

Most technical writing projects involve either an update to an existing manual, or a modification of some existing documentation to make it cover a new product. This is obvious to most of us. A company typically has a certain technology upon which it bases its products. Each time they have a new release, they release new documents to cover the new features. But just as the engineers started with the base version and added onto it, so too…

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Five Things that Decision Makers Will Like about DITA

Not long ago, a friend who works as a technical writer told me that his boss said the company doesn’t really care what efforts are required to create product documentation. After all, technical writers are paid for what they are doing. Why should a company invest in new technologies if everything works (or seems to work) fine so far? Essentially, what the boss was saying was that the company felt the current system worked, even if it was…

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Technical Writing and the Economy

This title weighs heavily on my mind, as does the topic in general. It’s almost too heavy for a blog post and yet it is an issue that we are all discussing. Where is technical writing going? For now, the answer seems to be “no where fast.” A disturbing trend that I am seeing in Israel involves companies making massive cuts to their staff. The technical writing department is not immune. We have been running a recent salary…

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