November 30th, 2011 by Alan Pringle
With 2011 waning, people are contemplating what 2012 will bring for technical communication. Our profession is changing rapidly, so intelligent conversations about the future of tech comm are essential.
All that smart talk has absolutely nothing to do with this post.
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April 28th, 2010 by Sarah O'Keefe
My presentation for the STC Summit in Dallas is finally done. The session, “Managing in an XML environment,” is scheduled for Tuesday, May 4, at 4 p.m. Central time.
I hope to see you in Dallas, but if you can’t make the conference in person, I will also do a webcast version of this presentation on June 15 at 1 p.m. Eastern time. That event is free but does require registration.
I’m sure you’re wondering about the duck. In my presentation, I will be introducing a formula for measuring documentation quality. It’s based on Quality, Usability, and some other factors that spell out, you guessed it, QUACK.
And if that’s not enough to bring you to the session, I also have several other animals in my slides. Consider yourself warned.
April 26th, 2010 by Alan Pringle
Sarah O’Keefe and Matt Arnold will be representing Scriptorium at the STC Summit in Dallas next week. If you’re attending the conference, be sure to visit our booth to meet Sarah and Matt, pick up some chocolate, and get a free copy of our updated white paper compilation, The Compass (while supplies last).
If you’re not attending the STC Summit, you still have a chance to pick up conference swag from us by visiting our virtual booth—a short survey that asks the same questions we ask conference attendees. During the survey, you can also ask us questions about any challenges you’re facing with developing and distributing technical content.
Complete the survey by May 5th (the day the STC Summit ends), and we’ll enter you into a drawing to win one of six copies of The Compass—and the winners get some chocolate, too. No Scriptorium conference booth would be complete without chocolate!
I’m not attending the conference, either, so you can consider me your virtual host at the virtual booth. I’ll “see” you there! (And you better hope I don’t eat all the chocolate before you get there.)
P.S. If you are attending the conference, you can see Sarah at three events:
April 16th, 2010 by Alan Pringle
Here’s a movie montage I found on YouTube featuring scenes of characters either offering or reading procedures:
Enjoy!
February 3rd, 2010 by Alan Pringle
Power blogger.
That’s a new phrase to me, and it was new to Maria Langer, too, as she noted in her An Eclectic Mind blog. As part of a podcast panel, she was asked to offer advice on how to become a power blogger. Some of her fellow panelists mentioned the quantity of posts, but Maria’s focus was elsewhere:
The number of blog posts a blogger publishes should have nothing to do with whether he’s a power blogger. Instead, it should be the influence the blogger has over his readership and beyond. What’s important is whether a blog post makes a difference in the reader’s life. Does it teach? Make the reader think? Influence his decisions? If a blogger can consistently do any of that, he’s a power blogger.
I couldn’t agree more. I appreciate reading any blog that gives me useful information or analysis that hadn’t occurred to me. For example, I recently had issues with a new PC I’m using at home as a media center. It was not picking up all the channels in my area, and an excellent blog post helped me solve the problem with little fuss. To me, that author is a power blogger.
What I frankly find irritating—and certainly not my worth my time—are blogs that are basically what I’ll call “link farms”: posting links or excerpts from other blogs with no valuable information added. I’m quite the cynic, so when I stumble upon such a blog, I figure the blogger is merely trying to generate Google hits and ad revenue, is lazy, or both. Quantity—particularly when said quantity is composed of rehashed material from other bloggers—does not a power blogger make.
When it comes to contributing to this blog, I try to write posts that have a least one nugget of helpful information, analysis, or humor, and I think that’s true of the posts from my fellow coworkers. (At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging about my coworkers, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read one of their posts and thought, “That’s smart!” or “That’s cool!”) Frankly, I’d rather not write anything at all than to publish something just because it’s been a few days since I posted. And I have a lot more respect for bloggers who write quality posts once in a while over those who put out lots of material that is borrowed from elsewhere.
And on that note, I’ll leave you with a short clip showing superheroes using their powers for a practical solution. (See, I’m trying to entertain you, too!)
October 19th, 2009 by ScriptoriumTech
by David Kelly
We recently updated a new instance of DITA OT 1.4.3 to create PDFs of Scriptorium proposals from DITA source files. We wanted to emulate the original proposal template, which included a lot of fonts that were not configured in the DITA OT’s PDF rendering engine, FOP.
Remembering the nuances of font configuration for FOP turned into a lengthy exercise. After seeing requests for help on configuring fonts in the DITA user’s group forum and FOP’s Nabble forum, we decided to publish a white paper addressing the subject. It covers FOP configuration, DITA OT configuration to use FOP-configured fonts, and how to reference configured fonts in the DITA OT’s XSL-FO style sheets.
The white paper is now available here:
Hopefully it will help prevent ugly little font scenarios like this one:
July 23rd, 2009 by Alan Pringle
Last night, a bit of spam managed to worm its way through the filters on a personal email account, and I have to admit I glanced at the content while scanning previews of messages. That’s when I spotted a paragraph that really jumped out at me:
They have good management systems, product quality inspection system. And international speedboat (EMS) is the door – door accurate! Soon!
My thought process was, What’s up with the international speedboats? And why are emergency medical services (EMS) using these speedboats? I knew that the person who wrote the content was likely not a native English speaker, but I could not figure out what the writer was trying to communicate.
This morning, I finally realized what the message was trying to say: the company uses EMS worldwide delivery services for prompt and accurate delivery to my door. My brain must not have been firing on all cylinders last night when I thought EMS meant “emergency medical services.”
I don’t think I’ve ever spent as much time thinking about a company’s marketing message, but my thoughts weren’t about using the company’s services–I was merely trying to comprehend the message itself. That’s not what the company intended, I’m sure.
Marketing for a global audience–particularly one that associates EMS with “emergency medical services”–is not an easy thing!
June 4th, 2009 by Sarah O'Keefe
About a year ago, we added Google Analytics to our web site. I have done some research to see what posts were the most popular in the past year:
Our readers appear to like clever headlines, because I don’t think the content quality explains the high numbers for posts such as:
We noticed this pattern recently, when a carefully crafted, meticulously written post was ignored in favor of a throwaway post dashed off in minutes with a catchy title (Death to Recipes!).
For useful, thoughtful advice on blogging, I refer you to Tom Johnson and Rich Maggiani. I, however, have a new set of blogging recommendations:
January 29th, 2009 by ScriptoriumTech
by Sheila Loring
Another reason to use Thunderbird. Someone ordered a birthday cake through email, and the Microsoft Outlook code ended up on the cake. *My* aunts wouldn’t understand, but I know several people who can appreciate the goof.
http://www.labnol.org/internet/microsoft-outlook-ruins-birthday-cake/6824/
January 9th, 2009 by Simon Bate
2 Tbsp olive oil
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
2 15 oz. cans chickpeas (NOT drained)
1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes, drained
1/2 tsp each thyme, rosemary, oregano, basil, marjoram
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 cup ditalini (uncooked)Heat the oil in a 3-4 quart saucepan. Add the garlic and allow to brown slightly.
Add the peas and their liquid, the tomatoes, pasta, salt and pepper, and ditalini. Bring to a boil, then let simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste and serve.
Grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano over each serving.
Now I have to figure out what to do next year. Has anyone else found some foodstuff with a similar relationship to our profession or industry?
January 5th, 2009 by Alan Pringle
The Shanghai Tech Writer blog has a hilarious list of awful metaphors written by high school students. These gems include:
The list does provide quite a bit of entertainment (well, maybe I’m easily amused), but many of the metaphors also demonstrate why technical writers should avoid using them. Metaphors are often culturally specific and therefore difficult to translate. For example, I wonder how many folks outside of the US know what a Thighmaster is?
October 23rd, 2008 by Alan Pringle
I’m constantly amazed by what you can find on YouTube, and this clip from a clever tech writer is no exception:
October 21st, 2008 by Sarah O'Keefe
Dear Sarah Palin,
Your campaign schedule looks brutal. And since you’re not flying commercial carriers, you don’t even get frequent flyer miles. It’s truly tragic.
Thank you for your personal letter. I have a few tips for you from the technical communication industry that should help you with future fund-raising attempts.
Your truly,
Sarah O’Keefe
PS Enjoyed your appearance on Saturday Night Live.
August 27th, 2008 by ScriptoriumTech
by Sheila Loring
Here’s an inside peek at a day in the life of a Scriptorium employee:
But wait, there’s more…a t-shirt!
Ladies, check out the regular expression skirt, too. The code is printed upside down for easy reading while sitting.
July 22nd, 2008 by Sarah O'Keefe
For 15 years, I was a lovesick FrameMaker groupie. Ask anybody. As a founding member of the North Carolina FrameMaker Users Network (NC-FUN), I went to meetings regularly for ten years to talk about everything FrameMaker: plug-ins, database connectivity, scripting, single-sourcing, structure, obscure features, you name it. I couldn’t get enough. FrameMaker was the great desktop publishing love of my life. When I joined Scriptorium Publishing earlier this year, I was given the task of updating Publishing Essentials: Unstructured FrameMaker 8. Yes! FrameMaker and I were inseparable.
But then FrameMaker 8 absolutely refused to produce an acceptable PDF file.
Whatever anybody might say about FrameMaker, one thing was always true: FrameMaker produced top-of-the-line PDF files. If you needed good PDF files, you included FrameMaker in your workflow. Now, PDF files produced from FrameMaker were a mess. Sure, some PDF problems had cropped up with earlier versions (and what relationship doesn’t have a few PDF problems?), but it was worse now. Much worse. Undeterred, I tried a lot of things. I found some workarounds, but the problem was never really fixed. I could get text and high-quality pictures or I could have hypertext links, but not both. I felt angry and betrayed.
Pfft. Why not dump FrameMaker completely and just move my content to a dedicated XML editor? After all, XSL-FO could also give me a lot of trouble followed by lousy PDF output. I was this close to telling FrameMaker to hit the bricks.
Then Microsoft released a hotfix that patches the problems with Windows that are apparently the root of FrameMaker’s PDF problems. So it’s not all FrameMaker’s fault after all. I applied the hotfix and FrameMaker is back in the house…
…but sleeping on the couch. I’m still miffed about the new conditional expressions. That’s a post for another day.
You have to request the hotfix to get it: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=952909.
April 24th, 2008 by Alan Pringle
I have been reviewing the content in Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8, which we plan to release next month. While reviewing the chapters, I have been reminded about some FrameMaker features I had forgotten, but I’ve also discovered a few puzzling things in the interface of version 8.
For example, there is a toolbar for the new feature that tracks text edits. To see the toolbar, select View > Track Text Edit Bar. The Track Text Edits toolbar is displayed. If the toolbar has Edits in its name, why does the View menu choice show just Edit?
I think this is a case for The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I bet they could track down that missing s.
February 14th, 2008 by Sarah O'Keefe
I’m a pretty decent Scrabble player, although not as good as some of my friends (I’m looking at you, Char).
But with these tiles, I’d be worthless.
(h/t Dictionary Evangelist)
January 29th, 2008 by Alan Pringle
I was saving a structured FrameMaker 8 book out to XML and encountered an error in the structured application I was testing. I knew I had a flaky read/write rule, so I went to the Help menu to select the Complete FrameMaker Help choice, which displays a web page with a link to the structured application documentation.
Imagine my surprise when the Complete FrameMaker Help choice was grayed out. I was very puzzled by this because I had used that very option just last week. I then opened one of the files in my FrameMaker book and checked for that menu option, and it was no longer grayed out.
On my laptop running Windows Vista, it seems that FrameMaker 8.0p266 lets me select the Complete FrameMaker Help choice only if a document file is open (or if no file at all is open). If a book file is the active file, the choice is unavailable.
Is this Adobe’s way of telling us book files are beyond help?
November 30th, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
Some days you get email that puts things in perspective. I have a cousin (actually, I have a LOT of cousins, but this is about one of them) who is in the Peace Corps. She is going to be teaching in Tanzania for the next two years.
She recently sent out an announcement about her assignment, which included this information:
The school is in the town of ______ in the region of _______. It’s in the very center of Tanzania. I shall have electricity and water close by. [...] The internet will not be too far away. There are rumors that it might even be at my school.
Something to think about when I complain about dead spots in my wireless coverage. She will have electricity and water “close by.”
September 24th, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
We’ve received orders from some pretty faraway places for our books…Qatar, Saudi Arabia, India, Japan, and Australia to name a few.
But we have a new winner in the Most Interesting category: Kivalina, Alaska
View Larger Map
Kivalina was evacuated in early September because of flooding: there’s an AP story here.
It sounds sort of like the North Carolina Outer Banks:
The community sits on a 600 foot-wide sand reef…
Well, except for this part:
…625 miles northwest of Anchorage and 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
There’s more information about Kivalina, which is described by the AP as an Inupiat Eskimo village, here.
It’s oddly compelling to know that residents of Kivalina are interested in technical communication.
September 7th, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
About two months ago, I set up an aquarium in my office. When fish starting disappearing, we put the most aggressive one, a zebra danio, into Fish Jail. When fish kept disappearing, we apologized to Hannibal and released him from the Finetentiary. (It appears that we had some supersensitive fish who died of stress, basically.)
No recent casualties, and two of the tank denizens are shown above; a glofish tetra and a platy fish.
Updated: Oops. I see I actually have three fish. Baby is in the corner.
(And all together now, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!“)
July 26th, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
Our new, corporate-wide logo.
Sheila had this on her bulletin board, and it made me laugh.
In late June, our local paper ran an article entitled Don’t Outdress the Boss.
In our office, that it really difficult. What fashion combination is a notch below my general summer uniform — a T shirt, capris, and flip flops? Swimsuit and coverup? Running shorts? A painting smock?
(For the record, I usually dress like an adult when meeting with customers or at conferences. Mostly.)
May 7th, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
Last week, I suggested that The end of the world is approaching because Adobe had made some comments about upcoming release.
Today, I suggest we all hide in our backyard bunkers, because of this:
The FrameMaker product team is looking for volunteers to participate in FrameMaker Prerelease Beta 2.
It’s a publicly announced beta for FrameMaker 8. No details on new features or other information, and I do not know whether participants will be required to execute a non-disclosure agreement.
Off to buy canned food and water purification tablets…
May 2nd, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
What other explanation is there for Adobe, nicknamed The Cone of Silence, making this announcement:
If you are planning to attend the [STC] Conference [in Minneapolis], you now have added incentive. We will be providing technology sneak peeks of the features of the next versions of FrameMaker, RoboHelp and Captivate.
For details, see Vivek Jain’s blog entry on the Adobe TechComm blog. No mention of a requirement for a non-disclosure agreement, so I assume any information shared at these sessions will be public.
I won’t call Adobe “transparent” just yet, but this reduction in opacity is quite welcome.
Update (May 3, 2007): Over at Core Dump, a post on the same topic entitled Hell is Freezing Over.
April 4th, 2007 by Alan Pringle
I just installed a wireless mouse on my PC here in the office. The instructions that came with the mouse have some interesting turns of phrase, including this gem:
[The mouse] combines with 27MH RF wireless technology, user-defined keys, and outstanding design, so that you can use it freely to improve your efficiency and enjoy your beautiful life from the high technology.
Yes, I often enjoy my beautiful life with high technology. Don’t you?
February 16th, 2007 by Sarah O'Keefe
(hat tip: Steve Rickaby, who posted it on framers this morning)
Note: Safe for work, but you might want to set aside all beverages before proceeding.
January 18th, 2007 by Alan Pringle
As of this afternoon, the snow is melted, but I justed wanted to prove that we do TOO get snow in North Carolina.
Oh, and that green stuff in the background? Those are daffodil shoots that started coming up last week during the heat wave.
September 12th, 2005 by Sarah O'Keefe
It’s become apparent that John Cleese of Monty Python fame has an in with Adobe. How else do you explain this:
FrameMaker: I’m not dead!
Adobe Sales: What?
FrameMaker: I’m not dead!
Adobe Sales: ‘Ere! ‘E says ‘e’s not dead!
FM Users: Yes he is.
FrameMaker: I’m not!
Adobe Sales: He isn’t?
FM Users: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
FrameMaker: I’m getting better!
FM Users: No, you’re not; you’ll be stone dead in a moment.
FrameMaker: I feel fine!….I think I’ll go for a walk!
FM Users: You’re not fooling anyone, y’know.
Adobe announces FrameMaker 7.2
Main product page
In depth page with FAQs and other release details
Tech comm problems? Contact us.
Scriptorium Publishing | Post Office Box 12761 Research Triangle Park, NC
27709 | (919) 481 2701 |
info@scriptorium.com
