Our Technical Writing 101 book is now available in an ePub edition. You can purchase it from our online store or get it from Apple’s iBookstore. (more…)
Archive for the ‘News’ Category
The ePub has landed! The ePub has landed!
June 24th, 2010 by Sarah O'Keefe
Increase your DITA literacy with The DITA Style Guide
June 18th, 2010 by Alan Pringle
To help technical communicators get a grasp on all the elements and attributes in DITA, Scriptorium Press will publish The DITA Style Guide: Best Practices for Authors by Tony Self, founder of Hyperwrite and chairperson of the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee. (more…)
Consulting without commitment
June 10th, 2010 by Sarah O'Keefe
Hiring a consultant can be intimidating. The RFP. The proposal. The prenuptial, er, contract agreement. The budget.
Sometimes, you just need a little bit of help without all of the craziness. For this, we have our new “instant consulting” service.
We have dispensed with all the bells and whistles. You buy as little as an hour of time through our online store. We schedule a mutually agreeable time to discuss your issue. You send any relevant information ahead of that time. At the specified time, we connect by phone (or Skype) and web meeting and go over your topic.
Instant consulting could work for a variety of situations, but we see it as especially helpful for these scenarios:
- Discussing the best strategy for your publishing workflow.
- Reviewing a strategic plan for your publishing workflow before you present it to upper management.
- Getting advice on how to handle a specific management challenge.
- Reviewing vendor proposals or helping to develop big-picture requirements.
We are open to other assignments that are of limited scope.
The cost is $300 for an hour; $1000 for four hours. You can buy in our store.
Of course, we continue to offer Big Project Consulting for larger engagements.
Free to a good home…industry research
May 12th, 2010 by Sarah O'Keefe
In early 2009, we did some research on XML adoption rates and collected the results in a fairly lengthy report. Here is the summary:
In early 2009, Scriptorium Publishing conducted a survey to measure how and why technical communicators are adopting structured authoring.
The survey received 616 responses. 29 percent of respondents indicated that they had already implemented structured authoring. Only 16 percent indicated that they do not plan to implement structured authoring. The remaining respondents were either in the process of implementing structured authoring (14 percent), planning to do so (20 percent), or were considering it (21 percent).
Content reuse and document consistency were given as the most important reasons for moving to structured authoring followed by the cost/effort of developing content.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is by far the most common structure being implemented. Use of DITA did not correlate with lower implementation cost.
A strong majority (67 percent) of respondents who indicated that they did not plan to implement structured authoring gave cost and time of implementation as the reason.
The most common authoring tools reported are Arbortext Editor, Adobe FrameMaker (structured), and JustSystems XMetaL. SynchRO Soft oXygen ranked well among DITA implementers.
You can get the whole thing on our white papers page.
It’s Technical Writing 101’s birthday, but YOU can get the gift of a free copy
May 11th, 2010 by Alan Pringle
It’s been a year since we released the third edition of Technical Writing 101, and I’d like to thank readers for offering us positive feedback on the new edition. I have to admit it’s gratifying to read comments such as this one from Peg Mulligan:
The discussions on Structured Authoring with XML, and Web 2.0 and Technical Documentation, are among the most concisely written, best stand-alone explanations that I have seen on these subjects.
To celebrate the third edition’s first birthday, we’re giving away a printed copy. Also, we have just five copies left of the second edition, and we will give the winner one of those copies, too. It will soon be a collector’s edition! (Yeah, right.)
The contest ends on Wednesday, May 26, so enter soon!
We owe special thanks to the many instructors who have used the book to educate new technical writers. If you teach technical writing and would like to review Technical Writing 101 for your classes, contact us at books@scriptorium.com.
Talk amongst yourselves…introducing forums.scriptorium.com
February 9th, 2010 by Sarah O'Keefe
Our web site now has forums for discussions of technical communication issues. We want to give you, our readers, a venue where you can set your own agenda instead of just responding to our blog posts.
Given Scriptorium’s particular interests, I expect to see a lot of emphasis on publishing automation and XML. But frankly, we don’t know exactly what might happen. Communities often develop in unexpected ways. It will be up to you—and us—to figure out what direction these forums go.
(We have an internal pool on how long before Godwin’s law is applied.)
The forums are available in our main site navigation. There are also RSS feeds so you can subscribe to a topic or category of interest. Or, if you prefer, you can get email notifications for new forum posts.
And how do we feel about this launch? We’re…perfectly calm.
Please join the conversation.