Markdown is a text-based markup language designed for content authoring. Using a limited set of formatting marks, you can create content and render it to HTML or another format.
There’s a growing buzz about Markdown in the technical communication community. While great for quick content development, there are some limitations to its usefulness.
The product content lifecycle should result in information that is traceable–each data point in a document should point back to a database or another information source from which the data point was derived.
But unfortunately, we are not there yet.
00:00 Alan Pringle: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 17 we discussed PDF. In a previous podcast, we talked about the death of training. So, now it’s time to discuss the death of PDF.
The scope and practice of content strategy is ever-expanding. From marketing to user experience to technical content development, the need for a strategy governing content creation and production grows. With this growth, the definitions of content strategy can vary, but they all recognize that the need for effective and targeted content is critical.
I’ve seen quite a few comebacks in my time, from bellbottoms to grungy flannel. But most of these trends are short-lived. A once long-standing staple among technical writing and content authoring groups has nearly gone extinct: the technical editor. Is it time for this role to make a comeback?
I’ve written in the past on how a QA mindset can improve the quality and consistency of your content. While having a robust test set and test plan are useful, there’s another tool that you can use.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Content creators love their tools. So much, in fact, they sometimes mistake selecting tools for developing a content strategy.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
A common content strategy mistake is duplicating the look-and-feel of existing content when you’re implementing new tools and processes.
Getting your DITA content into a high-design format like InDesign is a tricky prospect. The biggest stumbling block is the fact that there is no intrinsic link between your ICML and the template that you flow it into. In the end, your InDesign template (you’re using one, right?) is the most important part of a DITA to ICML workflow; it contains the actual styles that will control how your output appears.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
In 2013, I wrote that PDF is not dead. Four years later, it’s still too early to write the obituary.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
In addition to Scriptorium’s twentieth anniversary, 2017 marks the twelfth year for this blog, which started in April 2005 with a grudging And another one bites the dust… post.
A content strategy implementation requires you to address multiple technical facets: tool and process integration, specifications for how content is delivered, and so on. These technical details, however, are of little interest to the executives who control funding. They are much more interested in seeing results to justify continued spending.
We’ve written before on what lurks beneath the surface of an InDesign file, and how drastically it differs from the DITA standard. When you’re looking at going from DITA to InDesign, though, there’s a lot that you need to take into consideration before you jump in.
Web sites are fantastic at content delivery and generally terrible for content authoring. If you’re old enough (like me), you may have experienced the pain of hand-coding HTML or even editing HTML files live on your web server.
$0.21 per word.
That’s the average cost in the US to translate content into another language according to Slator, a translation news and analytics site. That number is not speculative; they analyzed the costs per word from over 80 actual proposals gathered by the US General Services Administration (GSA). You can view the source proposals here.
What factors affect content strategy decisions? Every client has a different combination of requirements, and of course there are always outliers. But based on our consulting experience, here are some factors that affect content strategy decisions.
Your project is coming along nicely. You have your workflow ready, your style guides are composed, and things are looking up. However, you have complex metadata needs that are starting to cause problems. You need a way to ensure that authors are only using valid attribute values, and that your publication pipeline isn’t going to suffer. This is a situation that calls for a subjectScheme.
A few months ago, I wrote about how you could benefit from having a test bed for your content. I made mention of use cases several times, but what are they, and how can you make them effective?
When I first started as a QA tech at a small game company, I was immediately thrown into the QA test bed. It was a place where we could test production-ready content without being interrupted by ongoing development or server restarts. Functionality was well-documented and could be used to test against our users’ bug reports.
Translating content for foreign markets can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. While it’s important to keep costs in check, the critical element to watch is quality. The only sure-fire way to ensure quality in translation is to build it into your source.
You have DITA. Now what?
More companies are asking this question as DITA adoption increases. For many of our customers, the first wave of DITA means deciding whether it’s a good fit for their content. The companies that choose to implement DITA find that it increases the overall efficiency of content production with better reuse, automated formatting, and so on.
Content creation should no longer be the exclusive domain of full-time writers. Employees in other departments can offer valuable information that your company’s content should capture. Where can you find these part-time contributors?
Lean manufacturing begat lean software development which in turn begat lean content strategy.
What does lean content strategy look like?
Last week I was working in my home office when I heard an odd hissing sound. Upon investigation, I found that my hot water heater had decided to empty itself onto the basement floor.
Fortunately I had some failsafes in place; the heater’s pressure release valve was doing its job by routing scalding hot water onto the floor, and my floor is slightly slanted toward a drain in the floor. This got me thinking (because my brain is oddly wired this way) about failsafes in content workflows.
