What Should Today's Ideal Help (User Assistance) Format Look Like?

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Alan Porter of WebWorks help authoring software has released a new white paper titled “Delivering Help for Today’s Web” which can be ordered from aporter@webworks.com Porter raises a number of important issues that I’ve also been thinking about for some time. It’s true that yesterday’s static help file system is losing…

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President Obama Signed Plain Writing Act of 2010

  © Ugur Akinci A new era has begun in the United States when President Obama signed the Plain Writing Act of 2010 on October 13, 2010. According to this, all U.S. government agencies and offices are now mandated to create all their documents and communications in clear, uncomplicated English. Here is the text of…

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How to Avoid Dangling Participles in Your Technical Writing

© Ugur Akinci “Dangling Participles” is the kind of writing error you should avoid in your technical documents because it changes the meaning of a sentence and often leads to unintended humor. But first — what is a “participle”? PARTICIPLE is the present- or past-participle form of a verb which is used as an ADJECTIVE.…

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How to Create a Pie Chart with Adobe Illustrator

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Did you know that you can create 3-D pie (and other types of) charts with Adobe Illustrator? Here is how: (1) Select the pie chart tool from the tool bar and double-click it to display the Graph dialog box: (2) Enter 200 px for both Width and Height of the chart…

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How to Write a Terrible Technical Document

© 2010 Ugur Akinci There are many ways to write a really bad technical document. Let’s look at some of the foolproof ways to accomplish that. (1) Obtuse or indecipherable document title Instead of calling your document “Mark-24 User Manual”, use one of the following titles: “M24/X-768 Set-5.3 Rev. 4.4.6.8 OPS-VII H4G5” Or “The All-Comprehensive…

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A Free Help File Software: HelpNDoc

© 2010 Ugur Akinci My readers know my fondness for Adobe RoboHelp for creating help files. But for those who cannot afford RoboHelp there are some free alternatives out there like HelpNDoc; free at least for personal use. If you need to use these programs commercially you may need to pay a small licensing fee,…

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How to Create an Index for an Adobe FrameMaker Document

Creating an index for an Adobe FrameMaker document requires two steps: marking the index entries, and then generating the index. To Mark the Index Entries 1) Launch FrameMaker 9 and open your document. 2) Select the text that you’d like to mark as an index entry. 3) Select Special > Marker from the main menu…

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