Online Video Courses

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

By Ugur Akinci | February 20, 2009

© 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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FrameMaker template

Display Framemaker Conditional Text by Using a Single Text Block

By Ugur Akinci | February 20, 2009

A Framemaker User Case Let’s say as a technical writer you want to display different versions of the same text in a FrameMaker technical document. You’d like to toggle different versions on and off. There is one condition however: you do not want to use multiple copies of the same text block (with perhaps different…

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Technical Writing – How Wikis will Transform Technical Writers into Information Coordinators

By Ugur Akinci | February 19, 2009

In case you are not too familiar with it, Wiki is a web site that can be built by many authors together. That’s its most basic definition. But “wiki,” which means “quick” in Hawaiian, refers to the application that makes a wiki web site possible as well. wikipedia is the world’s best known wiki but,…

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Technical Writing – How Not to Violate the English Grammar While Trying to Be Gender-Sensitive

By Ugur Akinci | February 18, 2009

This is a grammar error that I see committed by some writers these days:  mixing singular subjects with plural verbs and pronouns. As a technical writer you would normally never say “He enter their password.” But increasingly, in order not to commit a gender bias, I see documents that contain sentences like “the user should…

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