Posts by Ugur Akinci
How to Fix a Font-Related PDF Generation (Printing) Problem
© Ugur Akinci Sometimes you will not be able to generate a PDF copy of a MS Word or Adobe FrameMaker technical document because of a font problem. More specifically, your PDF will not be generated because you have the “Rely on systems fonts only” setting turned on in your printer preferences. This will create…
Read MoreThe Politics of Plain English vs. Obfuscation
Usually people don’t write in plain English because they don’t know any better. Sometimes a banker, an engineer, a doctor will write a business letter or a technical document in a way that he or she best knows how – by using jargon and long-winded sentences; clauses awash in passive voice and unparallel construction, with…
Read MoreTECHNICAL BOOK REVIEW: "Practical DITA" – A Nuts-and-Bolts Guide to Structured Technical Writing
Julio Vazquez has written a great book: Practical DITA. It’s a tightly-written thin volume (only 100 pages including the Index) that has a lot of nuts-and-bolts type of practical how-to information on DITA — Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The distinguishing characteristic of this short but comprehensive volume is the way it takes you by the…
Read MoreFree GANTT PROJECT Software for Technical Writing Projects
© Ugur Akinci A technical writing project has many phases and steps that need to be kept under control. One of the best ways to do that is to draw Gantt charts by using MS Project. But MS Project is not free. There are other free programs that also draw Gantt charts and provide an…
Read MoreA Simple Critical Path (PERT) Analysis for Time Estimation of Writing Projects
Time estimation is one of the critical tasks in any technical communication project. How long will a project take? When will you start doing it? And when do you expect to finish it? Similar time-performance related questions are usually not easy to answer with 100% precision due to the number of variables that are usually…
Read MorePlain Writing for Medical Insurance Policies — A Growth Field for Technical Writers
Introduction Without plain writing, medical insurance policies can be torture to read and understand. Example Please read the following description of “Primary Care Health Program” and see if you can understand anything: ——————————————————————- “The following rules determine which is the “primary” program: a) If the other program is not primarily a dental program, this program…
Read MoreHow to Convert ALL CAPS to Upper-and-Lower Case Letters in MS Word 2010
© Ugur Akinci Here is a useful tip that may one day save you precious time effort when editing a MS Word 2010 document. Imagine you have a text or list which is typed in ALL CAPS: How are you going to convert this list into a normal upper-and-lower case text? EASY! Follow these steps:…
Read MoreA Membership Web Site and Magazine You Should be Familiar with: SiliconIndia.com
If you’re not familiar with SiliconIndia.com you should be since it is on its way to become India’s LinkedIn and Facebook rolled up in one. It’s a membership web site where you’d find inquiries about CMS, documentation, all kinds of software and hardware platforms or management issues as well as… a spiritual poem a devotee…
Read MoreHow to Tolerate Ambiguity in Technical Writing and Keep Anxiety Under Control
© Ugur Akinci Technical communicators need to have a healthy capacity to tolerate ambiguity; not permanently throughout a project, but during certain phases of it. William Goldman, the award-winning screenplay writer and filmmaker, is famous for describing Hollywood as a place where “nobody knows anything.” And he meant it. The situation is not that bad…
Read MoreHow to Use "Edit Anyway" Button in MS PowerPoint
Here is another feature that I really love about MS PowerPoint: the whimsical “Edit Anyway” button. This button becomes very important and displays only after you mark a PPT file as FINAL. You do that to prevent others editing your file. But what happens if, after marking it as FINAL, you discover a typo, or…
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