Blog

Help Authoring

Best Help Authoring Study

Help trends are something that are rarely documented. Help authors do what they feel works for them and over time, a general consensus develops. At times, it is necessary to challenge of confirm that consensus. Recently, someone in Israel wrote to me and explained that the documentation manager was insisting that they include graphics in the online help. This technical writer wanted to know if I knew of any surveys or studies that discussed the best or accepted…

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December 11, 2009
Content Management / DITA

Converting Content to XML: the Truth You Should Know

Recently, we finished several conversion projects. These projects involved the migration of legacy content from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA and to proprietary client’s XML standards. Although there were some challenges, it was fun. We found new interesting solutions and obtained good results. We used Mif2Go and FrameMaker conversion tables, along with our own scripts and achieved a fast pacing conversion. The feedback that we received from the customers indicates they are as pleased with the results as we…

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December 10, 2009
Technical Writing

Innovation and the future of technical writing

We had a great meeting of the Jerusalem Technical Writers Group on Thursday night. I enjoyed presenting and was thrilled to see that this was a topic of “Innovation and the Future of Technical Writing” was of interest to those who attended. Some clear thoughts came out of the meeting - clear ideas about the current and future directions for technical writers. I’ll post my presentation shortly, but for now I’d like to summarize the main points we…

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December 7, 2009
Miscellaneous

Economic Predictions (or not) from Yossi Vardi

Yossi Vardi spoke last night at the Networking and Informative Event of the Startups and Societal Ventures Network meetup in Raanana (thanks to HP for hosting the impressive event). The top of his lecture was “What next? Economic situation and trends.”  He began the evening by explaining that he was not going to predict the future, other than to say that the economic downturn would turn around, though he would not venture to guess when. He quickly explained…

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December 6, 2009