The default mode for technical communications is basic, narrative-style unstructured content. It is easy to understand why, since most technical writing groups start out small in terms of members and products to document. A non-structured approach is the easiest way to start. As a company...
For roughly six years, I have been keeping track of the number of technical writer job postings on indeed.com—the largest job aggregator website in the United States. With the exception of a brief surge in technical writing job postings in late 2015/early 2016, there has...
In my book DITA For Print, I explain how to create a custom PDF plugin. The method I outline there is to first add stylesheets with the templates and attribute sets you want to override to the custom plugin; then import each of those stylesheets...
Get the Recording Topic The Path to Information 4.0 Date and Time Date: May 9, 2019Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT Here's what you'll learn during the webinar: What if you could get highly personalized and contextualized information tailored to your situation, location, and even mood?As the informational response to the Fourth...
Are you a competent technical communicator? The creation of information for use shall be assigned to competent persons (*)(*) ISO 82079 -article 10.1 Are you a competent person?Sure you are… because you love writing. That’s why you decided to move to technical writing.If you excel at English...
Get the webinar! Topic Another ISO standard! IEEE-ISO 82 079 Date and Time Date: April 11, 2019Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT Here's what you'll learn during the webinar: Join DITA expert Nolwenn Kerzreho and documentation specialist Marie-Louise Flacke to learn more about the insights and impacts of this ISO standard on...
There is no doubt that GitHub is a great resource, and I use it to host sample DITA files that I reference from DITAWriter.com. It is a great place for storing code, and can include storing content written in DITA. One thing GitHub is not...
What are production metrics, and why should we measure them? In a nutshell, production metrics provide the ability to:Set more accurate project estimatesGood from a project management standpoint Justify need for more resources (tools/people)Production metrics make it much easier to make effective arguments...
Ericsson and DITA Many customer product information groups at Ericsson are dependent on organization and product areas. Ericsson delivers customer product information continuously and in several tracks for a large number of software and hardware products.Ericsson has a legacy base of information content to be updated...
A content set grows organically over time. It’s created over many years, by many writers with many different writing styles and degrees of detail. In many cases, the content creators are no longer part of your company. Their content, however, lives on.It’s possible the content...