The business of technical communication
By default, managers and executives see technical communication as a cost center, similar to a QA department or a Human Resources group.
“Necessary evil” is not where you want to be for great career success.
How to succeed in ePub building with really trying
The ePub spec is long and very formal, but the format itself is fairly straightforward. And while building an ePub by hand is not complicated in itself, reworking content from other formats can be tricky.
Reengineering the humble datasheet
This year is shaping up as the Year of the Many Datasheets. Several customers approached us with variations on this theme:
Webcast: Extracting deliverables from DITA
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium surveys DITA’s publishing options and weighs their practical implications.
All your followers are belong to us?
In our latest hiring round, I’m seeing something new: candidates with existing social media networks. If we hire one of these candidates,
Balancing user advocacy and corporate responsibilities
Anne Gentle, in the post Writing Engaging Technical Documentation, says this:
I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.”
Retail therapy for tech comm (and I don’t mean shopping)
“She’s stupid.”
That’s what a shopper recently said about a coworker’s daughter, who is working a part-time retail job.
Using Ant to find a needle in a haystack
Many content management systems (CMSs) take over the responsibility of file naming. For the most part, this is fine and is actually necessary for maintaining cross-references and conrefs within the CMS. When you use the CMS to build a DITA map, the CMS uses its own names in the <topicref> elements.
A contrarian view of the future of publishing
Based on a quick Google search, things don’t look too hot for publishing:
