By JoAnn Hackos
The Minimalism Agenda for technical information and training was first developed in the late 1970s. John Carroll and colleagues at IBM Watson Research Center were asked to find more effective ways to help customers learn to use new desktop publishing software. Through direct observa[...]
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Archive for the ‘TechTools’ Category
January, 2013 § in TechTools
Minimalism Updated 2013
November, 2012 § in TechTools
What is the Ultimate Goal of Dynamic Publishing?
By MaryLee Grant
As an information development professional, I get asked a lot of questions about new technologies; recently someone asked me, “What is dynamic publishing?” Dynamic publishing means different things to different people. It can mean downloading and printing a PDF on-demand, or se[...]
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November, 2012 § in TechTools
Collaboration-The New Age Success Mantra for Technical Communicators
By Sai Kavitha K
Information Development is today going through a paradigm shift. Customers, channel partners, and support teams, expect a lot more than just producing the required documentation sets as part of release fulfilment. The technical writing community continues to be the catalyst that in[...]
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September, 2012 § in TechTools
Social Documentation and the Future of Technical Writing
By Michael Lykhinin
Technical writing is on the brink of paradigm shift from one-sided, didactic, expert-driven user documentation to integrating user-generated content, collaborative communication, and the power of communities. Today, documentation teams can and should utilize Web 2.0 approaches [...]
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April, 2012 § in TechTools
Review of Notepad++
By Kumar Dhanagopal
Notepad++ is a source code editor. By “code” I mean not just programming languages like Java and C, but also markup languages like HTML and XML. In this review, I focus on the value of Notepad++ as an HTML editor, particularly for users who are setting out to learn h[...]
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March, 2012 § in TechTools
Author-it’s New SaaS Cloud Authoring Platform for Enterprise-Level Writing
© Ugur Akinci
I’m not a regular Author-it user but, having sat through a webinar presented by the company Founder and CEO Paul Trotter, I have to say that I’m impressed by Author-it’s new SaaS (Software As A Service) cloud platform.
Author-it is an integrated single-sourcing and structured-a[...]
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December, 2011 § in TechTools
Write-up: PowerEdge R810 Hardware Owner’s Manual
Philip John and Sheena Lakshmi from the Dell team
PowerEdge R810 Hardware Owner’s Manual—The Award Winning Document at the 13th Annual STC India Conference Competition
The Product
Dell PowerEdge R810 is a high-density rack server that combines advanced management capabilities with leading pric[...]
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July, 2011 § in TechTools, WriteManager
Design Considerations in Web Development
By Kris Weylo
When you design, create and deploy websites, the following design considerations can be factored into your web development cycle:
1.1 Technical issues
A simple website created with a few HTML pages and content is usually quite easy to develop and maintain. When more functionality[...]
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February, 2011 § in TechTools
24 Key RoboHelp Terms
Nandini Gupta and Samartha Vashishtha
If you’re a new or intermediate-level user of RoboHelp HTML, you’ll surely find this compendium of 24 commonly encountered terms useful. And once you’re done with the basics, go ahead and explore the community content links under the respecti[...]
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December, 2010 § in TechTools, WriteRight
RCO, Estimation, & Ratio Analysis Technical Documentation, Part 3
– Makarand Pandit
This is the final essay of a three-part series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
In the previous article we talked about Ratio Analysis. We looked at
Frederick Ratio or Height Ratio
Sunil Ratio or Width Ratio
Mak Ratio or Distribution Ratio
In this part we will look at two t[...]
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History of Tech-Writing Tools
- Prasanna Bidkar
Technical communication existed in some form as early as the twelfth century, when Muhammad ibn Musa Al’Khowarizmi, a Turkish cleric, developed a writing method designed to achieve a specific goal. However, the last five decades have seen an explosion of technical inventions in [...]
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October, 2010 § in TechTools
Extracting content from PDFs to reformat using MS Word
The article talks about how to 'free' (read, extract) the content from the PDF files, using Acrobat 9 Professional. PDF being the final consumable output, it sometimes is difficult to extract content for re-use. The output can be of all sorts ranging from plain text to spreadsheet format.[...]
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XML: KISS and Tell
- Vishesh Gupta
The characters:
KISS, The Guru
KISS is an acronym for the design principle “Keep it simple, Stupid!”. The KISS principle states that simplicity should be a key goal in design and that unnecessary complexity should be avoided. The acronym was first coined by Kelly Johnson, le[...]
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August, 2010 § in TechTools
Five Adobe Captivate Tips
– Smitha V.
Five simple Adobe Captivate tips that help you design, develop, and review your projects quickly.
Create ‘stencils’ for your slides
Master Slide is a new feature in Adobe Captivate 5 that adds ‘stencils’ to your project. If you have common elements that you want to insert[...]
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Creating Portfolios Easily
- Suhas Yogin & Vikrant Rai
Technical Documents don’t exist in isolation. As we are all aware, the norm of the industry is documentation sets. A documentation set contains multiple documents, each with different pagination, formats, page sizes, and any other complexities that you can add to t[...]
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August, 2010 § in TechTools
Story of an Ungadgetted Technical Writer
- Sharada Palagummi
I am a technical writer and of course, I deal with technical content. I want to create great documentation. I know that technical knowledge and language skills are important, but I also want to use state-of the-art methodologies and authoring tools. However, my company does[...]
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June, 2010 § in TechTools
The Value of End-User Surveys in Testing Landing-Page Usability
- Kumar Dhanagopal
Organizations use websites for a variety of purposes: to sell products and services, to get contact information about potential customers, to convince users to subscribe to newsfeeds, and so on. Regardless of the purpose, most websites have a page that is designed to be the star[...]
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June, 2010 § in TechTools
Five RoboHelp tips
– Nandini Gupta and Samartha Vashishtha
In this second article in the technical communication tools series, we bring you five RoboHelp tips that will help you optimize your Help projects and generate better output.
Track the status of each topic from within RoboHelp
The Status tab of topic[...]
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April, 2010 § in TechTools
DITA Writing Tips
– Anindita Basu
DITA is about semantic tags. This means all content must be placed within tags that explain the purpose of the content. Thus, for example, a UI element is tagged with the <uicontrol> tag (and not with <b> as we’re wont to do in HTML) and a directory loca[...]
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April, 2010 § in TechTools
The FrameMaker Five
- Samartha Vashishtha
If you’re always looking for quicker ways to accomplish tasks, these FrameMaker tips are just for you!
1. Find is not just for text…
You can use the Find/Change feature in FrameMaker to look for many different kinds of objects across a book or in a document. In p[...]
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