Reusable Components in Structured Authoring

By Ugur Akinci

© Ugur Akinci It is useful to take an inventory of all the reusable components (text strings) in your technical documents as a prelude to structured authoring. Whether you use DocBook, DITA, or some other XML-based system, identifying the reusable components in your documents is an important prerequisite before you make the switch to XML-based…

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What a Technical Writer Should Know About DocBook?

By Ugur Akinci

© 2009 Ugur Akinci DocBook is a set of tools for implementing XML (Extended Markup Language)-based structured documentation. It is developed back in 1991 and is widely used today by those technical writers who generate single-sourced documentation. It is especially well suited for software, hardware and networking documentation. A DocBook set includes the DocBook DTD…

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XML Authoring is Here to Stay in Technical Writing

By Ugur Akinci

by Nabil Freij Guest Author Global Vision If you’ve been following the Technical Communications industry, you may have noticed the obvious migration that is happening towards XML (Extensible Markup Language) processes, tools and formats. Based on a recent survey implemented by scriptorium (scriptorium.com), only 16.2% of 328 respondents indicated that they do not plan to…

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What's the Best Way to Learn Structured XML-Based FrameMaker?

By Ugur Akinci

© 2009 Ugur Akinci FrameMaker (FM) is a great and popular technical writing tool with XML-based single-sourcing functionality. But its learning curve is rather steep. So how does a technical writer teach him- or herself structured FrameMaker? What’s the best way to learn? Here are my suggestions, based on my ten years of Fortune 500…

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