I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Some people feel that the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime is one of the utopias the Internet brings. For any question you have, the answer is a keystroke away. Google leads you to the site or person who can help. Country walls are irrelevant in the reach of information. You can connect with people in Malaysia, Australia, or Zimbabwe as if they lived next door. With this connectedness, all the silos and walled gardens tend to crumble as people, once strangers, connect and communicate with each other in milliseconds.

Last week while walking past Temple Square my friend John, a product manager where I work, painted a very different picture of connectedness. John asked me about Twitter, and as I was explaining it, Twitter seemed liked just another of the dozens of social media site out there.

“People always talk about how great it is,” John said, “that new media allows you to communicate and connect with each other, but that’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want all these people I don’t know emailing me and pinging me through Twitter, and Plurk and Linkedin and so on. I don’t see why anyone would want that.”

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A few weeks ago I started experimenting with surveys in my sidebar, mostly informal, and mainly to try out different WordPress plugins. Little did I know my surveys would incite so much controversy.

The latest poll, “Which Authoring Tool Is Best for You?” has received nearly 600 votes from people around the world, and was discussed at length on the HATT listserv. In all this discussion, I’ve realized one thing: technical writers are passionate about the tools they use.

“Passionate” is probably too positive a term. More like fanatical or zealous – but really technical writers span the spectrum with attitudes here. Some are fanatical, others are heavily invested, a few are open-minded, others are confused, and some are downright nasty.
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When you single source from an online help authoring tool and generate an output to Microsoft Word, almost invariably you have some clean-up reformatting to do. For me, one of these areas deals with screenshot images.

I prefer to have Word resize my screenshots (to a smaller size) because images look a lot sharper and crisper when Word resizes them rather than when SnagIt or Photoshop resizes them (even with smooth scaling selected).

Whatever your cleanup process, you might find the following image resizing macro helpful. It only resizes images that have a specific style (p_Result) before the image. It resizes the image to 75% of its original size.

Note: It’s important to isolate images that are surrounded by a specific style because you don’t want to resize all your images. You don’t want your note, tip, caution, and button images shrunk to 75% of their original size. Also, your substep images may need to have smaller sizes than your regular image sizes.

Here’s the macro: Read the rest of this entry »

After a topic title in your help, what do you write? Do you jump straight into the numbered steps, or do you explain why a user would likely perform the topic?

Although I practice the latter (adding explanatory text before the steps), I recently read an article by Mike Hughes that convinced me readers rarely read text that appears before a numbered list. Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended costs $699. The download is several hundred megs, and eventually Adobe pushes out updates that break it right when you need to deliver PDFs for your latest release.

In contrast, you can download the Save as PDF or XPS add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 for free. It’s less than 1 megabyte to download, and it quickly and flawlessly converts Word docs to PDF, even with hyperlinks. If you have non-Word documents to convert, Primo PDF (another free PDF alternative) will do it absolutely free.
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This is a guest post by Daniel Ng, a technical writer in Malaysia. Daniel mentioned an interesting article he’d read on the possible return of Corel Ventura, and I asked him to expand his thoughts in a guest post.

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Jara writes,

I am so glad that I found your blog. I truly need an advice. Initially I got accepted as computer science and business major, however I did not see myself stimulated by it.

So I changed to International Relations and Development studies, something I always wanted to study.

But now, I am faced with few job prospects. Even though I left to work as a reporter in the UAE. I love writing. But it is quite a competitive, still market and I wanted to go back to Canada, one year in the UAE was way too much for me.

Now I want to pursue technical writing as a career. I am motivated, since I am a hybrid between science and arts, and it will enhance my pay.

But I want to be trained as a technical writer, I have about 4 computer science credits, I know rudimentary computer science concepts, though  C ++ is something I can vaguely recall.

I really need your advice on this.

Are there any internships for technical writing positions? What can I do? And what are the computer software programs I need to know?

And I am a fellow blogger as well.

My best regards

Jara, thanks for writing. It’s good that you have skills in both computers and writing. That combination  provides a great foundation for a career in technical writing. You don’t have to be a computer programmer to land a job as a technical writer, unless you plan to write documentation for programmers. However, any programming knowledge comes in handy.
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I would like to take a moment to publicly thank Silahsiz Kuvvetler, the Turkish Hacker, for bringing down my withering Pligg site, Writer River.
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John Hewitt over at Poewar.com has an intriguing series of personal essays on life as a technical writer.
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After my last post in which I criticized WordPress for not hiring a technical writer to make their documentation simpler and more accessible, two things dawned on me. First, I’m an idiot for not recognizing an opportunity when it presents itself. I should write a comprehensive help file on WordPress and sell it. I’ll work on that.

Second, the interplay between simplicity and complexity is what technical writing is all about.

Although simplicity is a noble ideal, and something like “simplify complexity” could be the mission statement of any technical writer, simplicity is in fact a complex undertaking.

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Jane has wanted to implement something like Dooce’s Daily Chuck, where a new picture appears every day somewhere on the blog but not in the feed. The picture is usually just that — a picture, without much else. It works well to draw people to your site each day, knowing that you have something new.

For the past two weeks I’ve been trying to figure this out without much success. But I did come pretty close to achieving it. See the final effect here. And if you’re interested in the how-to, keep reading.

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For a company that recently secured $29 million in funding, has grown from nonexistence to worldwide popularity in just four years, and which has the reputation of being the platform for serious bloggers, it’s kind of bold for me to call attention to its biggest mistake in a post. But I’m convinced that it’s a huge miscalculation on the part of Automattic (the company that leads WordPress). The Automattic team, led by Matt Mullenweg, has about 25 engineers and …. not one technical writer. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader asks,

I caught your blog online and have been enjoying reading through the posts. I was wondering if you came across any information regarding creating usable online help for touch-screen applications. I found one article that talked about using RoboHelp to create drop-down hotspots and context-sensivitity to lessen the need for the standard clickable TOC navigation (since on a touch screen, you wouldn’t have the benefit of a keyboard and mouse). What we have right now can be improved. We have a hyperlinked TOC that is just too small for anyone to click on. We have Frame and will be getting RoboHelp. We want to be able to leverage the same source file to create the online help and a printed guide.

Just wondered if you’ve encountered or heard about anyone writing for touch-screen apps.

thanks,

Hannah

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I get a lot of questions from readers who stumble upon my blog while searching for answers to various things. I don’t mind getting questions, but a lot of times I don’t have good answers. I’ve decided to add a new question policy to my Contact page. The policy is as follows:

Note: If you ask me a question, I may choose to excerpt your question and post the response on my blog. When I do this, I’ll always protect your identity with a fictional name. If you don’t want me to respond to your question in a blog post, let me know. Posting responses via blog posts gives you a much larger audience to potentially respond to your question.

Most people are agreeable to this anyway, as long as I hide their identity. By posting the policy note before people submit questions, I can decrease the turnaround time, because I won’t have to first reply with a request to post the response in a blog post.

If you have a lot of photos that you want to organize online, like this site, don’t manually embed them into individual html pages. You’ll either go insane or your family will leave you.

Instead, use the NextGen Gallery plugin (and a WordPress self-hosted blog). The NextGen Gallery plugin allows you to upload zip files of photos in one batch and arrange them in galleries and albums so quickly it’ll feel like cheating. (Here’s an example of NextGen Gallery implementation.)