Category: Tech Writing
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Too Many PDFs on the Web
Accessibility expert Joe Clark on PDF and accessibility: The first thing to do with a PDF …is Google the URL. Seriously. Most of the time, Google does a half-decent job of making a PDF readable in HTML. Poor character encoding, ill-constructed multicolumn PDFs, and document security features can prevent Google from indexing a PDF at…
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Eclipse Docs and Faking
Gary Pollice on why I teach eclipse. Demo about writing a book on eclipse, converting to docbook and printing to pdf. More here. How to figure out which technical writers are faking it.
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Converting Wikis to Docbook
Using wikis to produce docbook/pdf documentation. Definitely one of the coolest things I’ve come across in a long time. (Thanks Lars)
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Reading Aloud & Icepick Critics
From Roy Peter Clark: David McCord tells the story of how he once picked up an old copy of St. Nicholas magazine, which printed stories written by children. One of the stories caught his attention, and he was “suddenly struck by a prose passage more earthy and natural in voice than what I had been…
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Roy Peter Clark on Writing
Will Durant writes: “Civilization is a stream with banks.. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story…
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MS Office and Open Formats
Dwight Silverman on Microsoft’s plan to offer more robust XML support: Traditionally, the formats in which Microsoft Office’s applications have saved documents have been proprietary. That means that only Microsoft’s own applications can be guaranteed to render those documents the way their creators intended them to be seen. Other programs, such as Corel’s WordPerfect or…
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Tips for Computer Authors & Noncomputer Authors
Ryan Cox on Tips for Authors of Computer Books. Added Golden Rule Jones(Chicago blogger Sam Jones) to my bloglist. Interesting literary roundtables (online book discussions). These things are kind of voyeuristic, but still fun to read. I’ve learned some things about genres (” Does Chick Lit have to be funny to work? Explain.)” and got…
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Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Writing
Techwriters and the Prescriptive Attitude by Bruce Byfield
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TEI vs. Docbook
Article: A unified model for text markup: TEI, Docbook, and beyond by Sebastian Rahtz, Norman Walsh and Lou Burnard. (Thanks, Lars).
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Fund of Lessons
Geoffrey K. Pullum lambastes the lousy style of DaVinci code: Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets…
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Kubrick’s Toilet
Directions for how to use the Zero Gravity Toilet in Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey
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Help in Longhorn MS OS
Lars Trieloff has a preview about MS Longhorn’s New Help Standard. Guess what– it’s written in MAML (Microsoft Assistance Markup Language).
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Docbook and Weblogs
Some quick things about documentation. Lars Trieloff has an excellent docbook weblog along with helpful categories of xml for documentation. Also, he is involved with DocMan, a docbook toolchain manager that allows export into various formats from docbook. Also, a thought-provoking article by Jenny of CreativeTechWriter about the whether STC (the professional group of tech…
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Docbook XSL
Eric Raymond is really big on Docbook. Here’s an online book on Docbook XSL. In a few weeks I’m going to create create Docbook pages with Morphon. Morphon is a free xml editor. Using Docbook on Windows to Create PDF and HTMLHelp. Creating a Docbook Application Using XML (Chapter from Oreilly’s Learning XML).
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OO v. MS Office
Article comparing Sun’s and MS’s Office approach to XML . Good article on trusted computing which I have not yet read. Saw a great movie over the weekend, Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater. Apparently, there will be a sequel next year. Currently reading ESR’s Art of Unix Programming.
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Grammar Police
I love the Willcopy Proofreading and Grammar blog. Great helpful examples.