Archive for 2013
How to Create a Master Document with Subdocuments in LibreOffice Writer
How to Create a Master Document with Subdocuments in LibreOffice Writer is a kill that save your documentation project one day. NEWS ITEM: MS Word’s buggy “Master Document” feature is deprecated in MS Office and will likely go through a slow disappearing act in the years to come, if it’s not redone to satisfaction of…
Read MoreFrameMaker and Word: Graphic Object Styles
How to Create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker (Part 2)
Continuing with our tutorial about How to Create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker. PREREQUISITE: Make sure your FrameMaker is set for structured authoring. Select File > Preferences > General and select Structure FrameMaker from the Product Interface drop-down list. NOTE: This tutorial is the second part of this tutorial. If you haven’t so far, please read this tutorial post first. Let’s…
Read MoreHow to Create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker
How to create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker is not an easy task. PREREQUISITE: Make sure your FrameMaker is set for structured authoring. Select File > Preferences > General and select Structure FrameMaker from the Product Interface drop-down list. (1) Select DITA > New DITA File > New <concept> … from the menu bar.…
Read MoreAn Excellent and (Free) PDF to MS Word Converter
© Ugur Akinci Here is an excellent PDF to MS Word converter that I’ve tried for two large documents, one 10 Megs and the other 25 Megs in size. Both documents were converted without a hitch. With other documents that had sophisticated visual design and formatting, the utility created some formatting issues (see below) but…
Read MoreSome words frequently misspelled by computer scientists
“Some words frequently misspelled by computer scientists: implement not impliment complement not compliment occurrence not occurence dependent not dependant auxiliary not auxillary feasible not feasable preceding not preceeding referring not refering category not catagory consistent not consistant PL/I not PL/1 descendant (noun) not descendent its (belonging to it) not it’s (it is)” FROM: …
Read More"Tech Writing Handbook" by iFixit
© Ugur Akinci Here is a “Tech Writing Handbook” for beginner technical writers. It’s very visual, pretty, looks great. Has high eye-candy value. It also covers the basics nicely. http://www.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing However, if you’d like to go deeper and learn more about all these topics while doing exercises, answering quizzes, and writing a User Guide…
Read MoreMathematical Writing: A Great Style Guide for Technical Writers
If you are writing scientific papers with a lot of math equations you may want to have a look at the following style guideline: http://tex.loria.fr/typographie/mathwriting.pdf Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts This report is based on a course of the same name given at Stanford University. Here is a…
Read MoreThe Psychology of Job Hunting in Technical Writing
Allow me to say a few words about the psychology of job hunting since I see some artificial obstacles that some technical writers set up for themselves and I’d like to remove them if I can. FIRST OBSTACLE The first obstacle is to think “I’m not a very good technical writer” or “I’m not a…
Read MoreHow to Insert Multiple Independent Numbering Sequences into MS Word 2007 Document by Using SEQ Field Codes
© Ugur Akinci Numbering is one of the weaknesses of MS Word unless of course you know how to do it right. If you try to maintain multiple numbering sequences by just using the numbering tool that Word offers by tool on the tool bar, you are doomed. I guarantee you your numbering system will…
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