Archive for 2012
Document Navigation Sidebar in MS Word
MS Word has a feature that I love to use and some writers seem to be unaware of. Word has a really great DOCUMENT NAVIGATION SIDEBAR with which you can directly go to any part of your document that starts with one of the standard Heading paragraph styles. It’s basically a list of ANCHOR POINTS listed…
Read MoreThe Worst and Best Review Scenarios for Technical Documents
Review process is where most technical documents either sink or swim: either they improve as a result of to-the-point and clear comments or they become muddled and actually deteriorate as a result of overlapping and conflicting feedback comments. I believe the quality and outcome of a review process has a lot more to do with the way…
Read MoreAdobe InDesign for Publishing Technical Documents on iPhone and iPad
I’ve been studying structured-authoring and DITA for some time with an eye towards publishing technical documents on mobile platforms like iPad and iPhone. I always thought that was the natural way to re-purpose and adapt my FrameMaker documents for the digital media. Recently, however, I became aware of another possibility as I started to study…
Read MoreBOOK REVIEW: Microsoft Manual of Style – 4th Edition is Out
Here is the 4th edition of a favorite of mine – Microsoft Manual of Style. I forgot the number of times in my career when this authoritative reference volume helped me settle the style arguments that would never have been settled otherwise. The fourth edition is a proof that Microsoft kept up well with the…
Read MoreThree Different Roles in Author-it Integrated Technical Publishing Platform
© Ugur Akinci Gone are the times when technical writers used to design their own pages, decide on the character and paragraph styles, write the content, and then publish their work. Almost every integrated technical documentation platform these days separate the role of template makers from those who actually compile the content and sit down and write…
Read MoreHow to Add a SEARCH Bookmark to a PDF Document
Usually a PDF document’s bookmarks are generated automatically by the “Distiller engine” based on the paragraph tags you define in the PDF configuration settings. These are usually based on standard tags like “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, “Chapter Title” etc. But what if you also wanted to add a SEARCH button to your bookmarks so that…
Read MoreHow to Create a Reusable Snippet in a SmartDocs MS Word Technical Document
A reusable snippet in SmartDocs is any reusable block of text and media. Think of a snippet as a “library item” that you can use any time you like by inserting it at where your cursor is. When you have a text saved as a snippet you do not have to write it anymore. It saves time and energy and…
Read MoreEmbedding vs. Linking an Object in a MS Word Document
© Ugur Akinci You can insert objects into a MS Word document in two ways: By embedding them, and by Linking them. If you embed an object, when the source object is changed, the Word object will NOT change. If you link an object, when the source object is changed, the Word object WILL change.…
Read MoreAdvantages of Content Management System (CMS) in Technical Writing
I believe not too far into the future a great majority of technical documents will be produced through Content Management System (CMS) platforms. Reduced to its simplest terms, a CMS is a text editor ran by a relational and searchable database. Content Management Systems are not cheap and they have a learning curve. That’s why…
Read MoreHow NOT to Write a User Guide
I don’t like to be negative in general. Life is too short to go around fuming about things that we can’t change. However, there are times when we all need to be critical in order to improve things; especially if they fall within our area of expertise. The other day I bought an iPhone docking…
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