October 22nd, join Simon Bate for a session on delivering multiple versions of a help set without making multiple copies of the help: We needed to generate a help set from DITA sources that applied to multiple products. However, serious space constraints prevent us from using … Read More
Lost in translation (and in my brain)
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 … Read More
Murder by metaphor
The Shanghai Tech Writer blog has a hilarious list of awful metaphors written by high school students. These gems include: Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. Long separated by cruel fate, … Read More
Put the drawing tools down!
This list of technical writing myths has a decidedly DITA slant; I don’t necessarily like the idea of DITA driving what is and isn’t acceptable practice for technical writing. That being said, I endorse the information provided about myth #4: 4. The Callouts on Graphics … Read More
Food for thought on document maintenance
[Updated to add link that I rudely left out.] In a report from tekom (link in German), we hear about a session on translation reuse strategies. The presenters point out one underappreciated risk of translation management — language evolution. They note that as languages evolve, … Read More
SDL and Idiom: A marriage made somewhere warm?
[corrected stupid math error] I was talking to someone from SDL about Idiom a few years back. “We hate their %$#!%$#@! guts,” he told me. I never found out whether this was because Idiom was taking sales from SDL or because, I dunno, this person … Read More