What gives Kent the perhaps unique perspective that looping and rolling and flying upside down was less stressful than managing tech pubs? Kent recalls the gradual decline of the technical publications craft over the course of two decades as cost reduction became the primary focus, and executive decision-makers expected tools to compensate for skills – after all, tech pubs was “just typing …”

First came the tools frenzy, with desktop publishing, multimedia, hypertext, and other bells and whistles being thrown at writers who were given those tools with the expectation of making their content better - with a tacit understanding that “better” mainly meant “cheaper to produce.” This was followed by the cumulative starvation programs of “do more with less” and the emphasis on not producing good, but “(barely) good enough.”

Kent saw a downward spiral that helped writers produce more and more substandard content faster and faster, and distribute it in more media, and more languages than ever before. And about the time that content could be automatically marked-up and single-sourced and tagged—with more emphasis on the tags themselves than on the content between the them—Kent left the field and stayed away for nearly ten years.

Then, completely by accident, Kent stumbled across acrolinx, makers of acrocheck, and was immediately hooked. What he discovered was a tool that can objectively measure the quality of “all the pesky stuff between the tags” that the consumers of the content actually see – a QA/QC tool for tech pubs!

Kent admits that the idea behind acrocheck is hard to explain to people used to worrying about quantity of output rather than quality of the customer experience. He describes his product as a “spell-checker on steroids.”  With a sophisticated natural language processor under the hood, it does check spelling and grammar, but it also checks conformance to your organization’s style guide and terminology guidelines. It also provides objective metrics and reporting that managers and executives crave, and an ROI that the CFO can’t ignore.

The idea that measuring and improving content quality can improve the lot of technical communicators is not a new idea, but this particular combination of product, methodology, and messenger is. At DocTrain EAST, where the theme of the conference is Advancing Your Career, technical documentation professionals can find out more about this tool.

The ability to re-use the content source, without having to copy (and ultimately maintain those copies) is a distinct advantage for many communicators who want to get the most efficiency out of their core processes, in order to spend more time on the actual creation of content. However, making the switch to topic-based writing isn’t as simple as chopping up a document into chunks.  Topic-based writing is as much an art as a science, and a discipline for topic-based writing has emerged from the work started with help authoring tools.

Mike Hamilton is one of the professionals in the field who has been around since the early days of topic-based authoring, and has watched the development of this field into a discipline complete with industry leaders and best practices. Long before it was in vogue, he used topic-based authoring to create training materials, and then turned to working on the products themselves, as a product manager, to improve their functionality. Now, as VP of Madcap Software, Hamilton evangelizes not only his product, but the art and science of topic-based authoring. On Hamilton’s blog, he discusses the finer logistics of creating topic-based projects, such as using CSS stylesheets to control formats or the implications of using XML, as well as answering product questions.

Hamilton presents MadCap Flare - An Introduction to Topic Based Authoring: (Part 1), MadCap Flare - Content Control and Publishing Techniques: (Part 2), and MadCap Flare - Controlling Document Look and Feel with CSS at DocTrain East 2008.

The across Personal Edition can be used either as a standalone application or as a remote client for direct access to across servers (crossWAN). For example, freelance translators always work with one single installation, irrespective of the current task and workflow.

When you register for your free Personal Edition, across takes you through a short, easy registration process that also adds your name and a brief resume of your qualifications to a pool of freelance translators. In this unique database, companies who already use across, but need translators, can easily find one.

across believes this allows for seamless processes, maximum transparency, and shared use of all resources.They also offer full support to freelancers through free on-line training (limit 2 in the course of six months) or their free (unlimited) interactive tutorials on “Project Management and Translating with across.” Tutorials are about 10 to 15 minutes long, so you can learn where and when it’s convenient for you.

While you are at it, you might want to check out the across library of white papers on Consistent Terminology, Translation-Oriented Authoring, or any number of other topics that could make the translation process easier for you and your clients.

across Systems is a Silver sponsor of DocTrain EAST 2007. The event takes place October 16-20, 2007.  Advancing your Career is the theme of the conference and is designed to help you improve the skills and expertise you’ll need to future-proof your career and improve your value as a professional technical communicator.

About across
across Systems is the manufacturer of the across Corporate Translation Management (CTM) software solution. Headquartered in Germany, across Systems is a spin-off of Nero AG, the provider of the world’s leading CD/DVD application.

The software includes a translation memory, a terminology system, and powerful project management and translation workflow monitoring tools. From project managers to translators and proofreaders, all involved parties work within a single system, either in-house or over a seamless connection to external language service providers. Open interfaces allow the smooth integration of third-party systems.

For managers (and freelancers) download the free—and much-anticipated—Freelance Rate Chart. It’s designed to help managers identify what to look for in current rates and qualifications when hiring freelancers of all kinds—from copywriters to technical editors.  Still not sure how much the total project should cost? Check out the Guide to Estimating Writing Projects to get an idea. Plan carefully and keep in mind that this guide estimates meetings and communications, writing, editing, and design separately, and all projects are not created equal. But using this guide should give you a pretty good idea of what a total writing project might cost.

Writingassist.com is also a great source for informative articles like Five Secrets to Interviewing and Hiring (technical communications professionals); Communicating for Diversity; and Dealing with Professional Burnout. These articles contain some good advice from industry professionals who have been in the business for a long time.Writing Assistance President, Scott Hartmann, has led his technical writing staffing firm to a 60% increase in revenue year to date over 2005, and has been featured in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, where Writing Assistance was named one of the top 50 Fastest Growing Companies in the Twin Cities.

About Writing Assistance
Writing Assistance, Inc., a leader in contract technical writing, copy writing, web content specialists and training developers is dedicated to the proper placement of contract writers nationwide. Founded in 1991, Writing Assistance now serves over 2500 clients. Writing Assistance offers the expert writing services of more than 15,000 writers nationwide offering both on and off location services.

Highlights include:

• Terminology management across the content lifecycle
• How terminology can drive the faster delivery of consistent content to global markets
• A discussion on the ROI of managing terminology, with information from SAP
• Customer success stories, including a new one from SAS alongside Bosch, HP, Giesecke & Devrient and Siemens Medical Services
• A best practice terminology management example as it affects every department in the organization, including Search Engine Marketing

Download the white paper

In today’s world, technical documentation and training managers are being asked to provide management with quantitative metrics to justify and analyze costs. Because they lack the proper tools, many managers fall short in collecting these observable, measurable facts. Abel will address the latest developments in software that automatically gather and report metrics for a wide variety of purposes. In addition, he will discuss how content quality is improved when your organization’s information, and those who create it, are effectively managed.

Register today!

• Benefits of FrameMaker for Structured and Unstructured Documents
• FrameMaker Deep Dive: DITA Topic-based Authoring and Single-Sourcing
• Introducing Adobe FrameMaker 8 : Now with Flash, 3D, DITA and Unicode support!
• Tour of Adobe RoboSource Control 3 in RoboHelp 6
• Increase ROI When Migrating from Word to Adobe FrameMaker
• Intro to Adobe RoboHelp Server 6 and Adobe FlashHelp Pro
• Benefits of Structured Authoring and Migrating in Preparation for XML

View an on-demand event now.

Download the free plug-in from the Typefi website.

Used with Typefi Publish, it offers enterprise-wide automated publishing with a design-driven approach. One of the challenges of organizations today is to be able to quickly produce brand-consistent documents that are richly designed.  In the past this required a lot of programming or slow turn-around from the design department. Now with Typefi Publish, designers can focus on creating brand consistent designs and authors can simply write in an XML authoring tool or Word and automatically generate a finished brand-consistent document that was designed and generated in Adobe InDesign.

About Typefi
Typefi is a world leader in the provision of intelligent, scalable, cross-channel publishing solutions. Typefi provides completely standards-based, scriptless publishing solutions for the rapid production of richly-formatted documents such as books, annual reports, technical manuals, journals, and marketing collateral in workgroups or enterprise-wide.

The new pricing option, which becomes available today, allows DocZone customers to purchase blocks of minutes for a fixed per-minute rate, with discounted rates available with the purchase of larger amounts of usage time. There are no restrictions to the number of users that can share the purchased minutes within a customer’s DocZone environment. This approach is similar to the programs offered by mobile telephone carriers today.

DocZone.com is the first content management system vendor to introduce pay-per-minute pricing. More on this story to follow.