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2. eM gt sal Ee i 3 mS CG I q i s x L L i u mi d i z E n TA i i i u i Li T U J vA a 1 f I Em i i S r u L ail 4 A cu fi 1 i a u J b j PR LI i PP Horses for courses Preparing winning images for your website Finally software that delivers single sourcing with the power of XML at your fingertips VERECDUS e One click generation of HTML Help Microsoft Help Apple Help WinHelp Veredus Web Help Sun JavaHelp Oracle Help for Java PDF and PostScript e Easy documentation of APIs directly from source code e Seamless importation of existing content e Intuitive easy to use interface Generate output in any standard format Change your Re use content anywhere in your project Changes you output target without painful conversion processes make at the source are updated automatically Try it free for 15 days www rascalsoftware com trial Buy it www rascalsoftware com purchase veredus Be a star user Submit a project and be selected as a customer testimonial Contact sales rascalsoftware com SOFTWARE www rascalsoftware com istc e call 001 206 624 7300 Contento 3 Features Getting the most from customer visits 12 FRANCISCO ABEDRABBO and LYPP TEK KHOO ELLIS Developing our understand
3. 3 When participants are real experts motivational and knowledge problems are reduced Methods for the study of document design The lectures in this track were divided into seven threads from Formative Evaluation Methods on the first day of the conference to Designing Instructions on the last The ISTC Newsletter has already featured Hans van der Meij s Design Guidelines for Procedures visit www istc org uk pages newsletters php for an abstract Another highlight was a paper entitled Ethnographic methods for evaluating document designs This lecture was in the Formative Evaluation Methods thread and explored the use of on site observation and on site inter views in testing survey questionnaires Rhetoric and persuasion The second track gave insight into research on what makes persuasive documents effective tracking the dynamics of advertisements and the preparation of publicity material among other things One highlight was a paper on Rhetoric in advertisements Towards a new taxonomy of rhetoric in word and image Institutional documents These are typically documents produced in the public sector The papers presented encompassed communication in business law politics and education Particularly memorable was Judy Delin and Rob Waller s pres entation Branding in relationship communications These two speakers are practitioners working at the Information Design Unit in Newport Pagnell Delin and W
4. The updated visual design introduced in the Spring 2004 Communicator met with uniformly positive feedback Most comments came during telephone calls and at meetings but some were expressed in writing For example Paul Ballard Managing Director of 3di Information Solutions wrote to say My colleagues and at 3di really like the design changes you have made to Communicator The rationale behind each change was also good to read The Editor of The Nuclear Engineer ISTC member Keith Simm called with encouraging feedback He too liked being given an explanation of the changes we had made He also offered a suggestion which was to change to a heavier paper stock to reduce showthrough We had noted this problem which is most noticeable on the reverse of advertisements Given that past feedback from ISTC members has shown support for using recycled stock I d already had sample pages printed on recycled paper of the same weight as our present stock This proved to be more opaque so we may be able to kill two birds with one stone on that score next year If you have any other ideas for further improvements or comments generally drop me a line teaching to swimming We ve even heard from some organisations that lay claim to exclusive use of the initials even when they were founded after us and such acronyms cannot be owned Our standards correspondent Richard Hodgkinson reported that a contact investigating his FIST
5. il A N al A relatively guiet guarter saw 125 postings to the Group but 12 of these were forwarded contract opportunities Although most were from agencies two direct opportunities came from the Ouality Authors Website at www gualit yauthors co uk The site is now maturing nicely with a good number of members and a variety of articles and book reviews Anyone who is not a member should seriously consider joining Clients looking for freelance authors do look at the site If these opportunities are then posted to the list it means that people already have enough work a good advertisement for the site Leaving the rat race An interesting thread arose from Mick Davidson s reguest for the latest news on the job market Several authors announced that they have moved or are planning to move to the country from the cities Jane Dards moved from Hampshire to Wales to escape the high housing prices deteriorating guality of life and rising traffic levels She wrote Thank heavens for the Internet which allows me to work where I want to irrespective of where my clients are Greg Stevens is currently moving from Reading to Cumbria to a bigger and cheaper house from which he can walk the fells He wrote I will be home based and will initially continue my current contract I am lucky enough to live in Cornwall and would not contemplate moving to an urban area With the advent of broad b
6. tion of ILS and its relationship with technical communication Readers will be in no doubt that the preparation of accurate technical documentation and training mate rial relies heavily on good source data That data is now being gener ated more often than not through ILS activities of one form or another ILS engineers who undertake the various analytical tasks 18 Careers 8 Careers that we have only touched upon are in their own right technical communica tors They will I am sure welcome the opportunity to join the ISTC ICI Tom Nicholas has 26 years experience in the provision of specialist support services to defence and commercial industries He has been employed by TMS Publications for four years and is now Sales Manager for TMS Support Solutions E mail tnicholas tmsss com Velma Parker is a recognised and respected ILS practitioner with 24 years experience in ILS working on major programmes with both the UK MoD and US DoD Velma joined the TMS team early last year and is now Head of ILS E mail voarker tmsss com TMS Support Solutions Limited incorporates the following subsidiary companies TMS Publications Limited TMS Logistics Limited TMS Training Limited and TMS Placements Limited Website www tmsss com ie placements SOLUTIONS LTD www tmsss com tms placements limited is a newly formed operating arm of tms support soluti
7. to be used this helps to achieve the closest possible approximation to the original on screen design Consider carefully the paper you use glossy coated papers tend to give the best results but you can save money by using a machine finished paper Paper qualities that influence colour reproduction are the Smoothness of its surface Brightness of its surface gt Opacity Viewing environment Problem The user s monitor does not show a realistic representation of the image The colour balance brightness and contrast of a monitor may distort the colour values in a displayed image Solutions To optimise the monitor Set the display to True Colour Depending on the operating system this may be referred to as 32 bit colour or Millions of colours or 16 7 million colours It means that the monitor can display 256 greyscales for each colour in each pixel Set the background to a neutral colour ideally select a neutral mid range grey using RGB val ues of 128 for each colour This reduces the likelihood of introduc ing colour casts while working with colour If the digital controls of your moni tor permit it set the white point to 6500 Kelvin Note Make sure the monitor has been turned on for at least half an hour before adjusting the display Note CRT monitors respond better to this process than LCD panels This is because CRTs have a higher level of illu mination than LCD and c
8. Determining the scope and severity of Interpreting data using cognitive psychology and learning theory Calde S 2003 Design Research Why you need it Cooper www cooper com content insights newsletters asp Hackos J T and J C Redish 1998 User and Task Analysis for Interface Design Wiley Nielsen J 1994 Guerrilla HCI using discount usability engineering to penetrate the intimidation barrier www useit com papers guerrilla_hci html Olshvsky R 2002 Bridging the gap with requirements definition Cooper www cooper com content insights newsletters asp Quesenbury W 2003 The five dimensions of usability in Albers and Mazur Eds 2003 Content and Complexity Information Design in Technical Communication Lawrence Erlbaum pp81 102 WinWritersUA 2003 Annual Skills and Technologies Surveys www winwriters com Formerly a technical writer and trainer for a European software house is now a lecturer on the MA Technical Communication course at sheffield Hallam University SOLUTIONS LTD www tmsss com The services offered include limited tms support solutions is a multi skilled support organisation that has evolved from TMS Publications Limited Bid Preparation established in 1991 tms support solutions limited now Integrated Logistic Support ILS employs 70 specialist sta
9. but also to prevent marker pens damaging the wall surface beneath 3 When juggling a large surprisingly heavy roll of brown parcel wrapping paper using a knife to cut the paper is much easier than using scissors 4 Tape the paper to the walls and at the far left hand end write the name of the process as a working title 5 Lay out the rest of the room so that materials and documents are easily to hand and a flip chart or white board is accessible Where possible ensure that any refreshments are accessible but do not require attendees to walk between the paper and other people Often a useful layout consists of an island in the centre of the room a table for documents and materials and perhaps another for refreshments with a clear path around it and the brown paper on the walls Discovery With everything planned a properly prepared team and an organised venue the discovery session can now start The purpose of the session is to gather accurate information to create process documentation If you know that your skills lie in documentation not in organising and motivating consider using a skilled facilitator to run the session while you concentrate on recording it You may need to create one or more of three broad types of documentation Table 1 The session s key aim should usually be to create a full process map which includes all the process elements needed to complete the cross functional and relatio
10. discount for bookings palid by 320 June Swincludin me Indexing derki A new feature run by the pk of deners MAM Ann Little on little ann talk21 com cal or 020 8422 4689 Mi 22 e Learning e Learning Creating web based courses Ron Blicq explains how to design an online programme that teaches professionals how to write well without an instructor monitoring their work Introduction I have developed eight online courses that teach participants how to write e mail messages letters reports and proposals without having an external instructor evaluate their work Doing so however posed significant problems I had to design the programme so that there would be a stream of interac tivity between the course participants and their computer screens I had to create learning loops that would take participants through different routes to accommodate different learning capa bilities and I had to keep the cost low so that the programme would be within reach of a wide range of potential users The course went online in 2001 Here I will describe how the course evolved some of the strategies I used in designing it and our experience after nearly three years of operation Background I first taught courses in technical communication for technical profes sionals in the mid 1960s and have done so continually since then In 1975 to meet the needs of engineers in remote locations in North America and E
11. lightest line weight supported by an output device Hot folder a folder that periodically checks for the presence of new files and then carries out a defined process Imposition positioning pages ona press so that when the sheet is folded the pages fall in sequential order Lithography a common printing process in which image and non image areas are distinguished by their attraction or rejection of oil and water the image area attracts oil based inks PostScript a language for describing text graphics and page information to output devices Printer s marks marks used by printers to process pages during and after printing these include trim marks to cut over size paper to final size RIP Raster Image Processor software or hardware that converts PostScript operators into final high resolution one bit raster data for printing plates or film Spot colour a custom colour that is specially mixed and not created by combining other inks spot colours can be used to reproduce corporate colours accurately or to embellish single colour printing by adding one or more colours Spot colours are often selected from custom libraries like the Pantone range White point coordinates measured in the CIE XYZ colour space at which red green and blue phosphors at full intensity create white This is measured in degrees Kelvin and is often known by the temperature for example D65 D6500 and D50 D5000 are preferred white points for w
12. Gaining momentum You need to talk to your top level management to gain momentum and their approval in your effort The most important item is to let management realise the benefits that customer visits will provide to the company Write an executive summary explaining the bene fits and goals Explain that through this effort you will be able to understand the users expectations and discover how they really use the product and documentation This knowledge will enable you to provide higher quality documentation which will increase customer Satisfaction with the compa ny s products 2 Understanding your budget restrictions Explain to management that since you already have the content for the ques tionnaire and templates for the contact letter Figure 1 most of the prepara tory work is done However you need their support financially Ask them to cover the costs of travelling lunches with the customers and any small gifts for the customers You might want to Start with a site that is very close to you This way you can gain experience without too much expenditure When you present your customer visit report to management and they realise the benefit to the company management might be more willing for you to visit more customers 3 Creating your customer visit committee Once you have gained management s approval you need to get the support from your peers Tell your team what you are planning and get volunte
13. HTML With my previous experience in developing distance learning materials I would write the course content Our objectives were to m Create courses in which the participants interact frequently with the information we wanted participant programme interaction to occur on average every fourth screen Have the participants evaluate their own work and programme the system to score the results a Create a programme that can be accessed from any computer and allow for users who do not have high speed access Design courses that would suit participants with varying needs and skills a Stream participants who demonstrate they need additional instruction through extra learning experiences without letting them feel that they are slow learners a Provide additional assignments for participants who want to send them in to gain feedback from us as instructors even though the courses are intended to be stand alone We thought initially that we could purchase existing Web delivery soft ware to bring our courses online This however proved impossible because no software we evaluated could integrate the complex measurement techniques and streaming principles we planned to use We consulted with a software development team in Rochester New York and asked them to identify whether it would be more practical to modify an existing program or develop a new software engine They recom mended designing software that wou
14. OFS YY eR es Fe CA Bihat jih Roper lj CL Di Lie Emu Si ed ee sme pp ee eee eo eee ee eee mph A se kB eee Ta SAlft oPe SPB FP RSAS EE eee b le Figure 3c Join the two halves and fill with a tint Figure foe Pee Deeg Pee Gee jostle im Gi ee eee Peis See ga Gee Gee Emu ee ip ibA G0 minm V SALE OS aE A EI Ma a aa a a Dua 2 Ite GE eee va Bee ee ed kr rege e ee a E Wu o o o 3d Label the button d Creating a graphic You are unlikely to find all the graphics you need for your website from clipart galleries so you will need to create some of your own Here as an example we look at a common requirement creating a custom designed button for a hyperlink as used in Figure 1 This task uses many of the skills you need to master to create graphics generally All popular imaging applications provide the tools needed to create graphics of this type these instructions relate to Paint Shop Pro but equivalent tools exist in other packages 1 Decide the size shape design and colour s of your button 2 Create a blank document drawing canvas of the correct size and Zoom in so that it fits comfortably onscreen If necessary set the colour depth the number of possible colours in the document to 16 million colours although we will eventually save the document as a GIF with only 256 colours By working with lots of colours at this stage we can use shading tools that only
15. Support Support and Test Equipment S amp TE Reliability and Maintainability R amp M a Safety and Testability a Facilities Manpower and Human Factors a Training and Training Equipment a Technical Documentation Packaging Handling Storage and Transportation PHS amp T a Disposal ILS requirements are reduced tailored for each project to design support that is cost effective and ensure that services and spares are at the right place at the right time Figure 2 At this point the relationship between technical documentation and training material technical communication and ILS starts to become apparent We will now follow the process further to unveil ga MAMTEMARCE PLAMENI STAND OLE ATH E al ae DESH ee Sa PPiT SP AES AE PAHA Bert eee Lior TH I PEPOT ANMNALYGIE TEST UEFE HT PODUPFPUTEM HE SLUHCE sl PR IT DAC ATA Thiet TA AIMIH ES E TAAL _ EOUPNENT Figure 2 Tailored ILS reguirements the activities that both influence and generate the source data that will even tually provide the content for technical documentation and training material Training Needs Analysis TNA Safety Case and Hazard Analysis Level of Repair Analysis LORA Availability Reliability and Maintainability AR amp M incorporating How is ILS employed The ILS process revolves around the Logistic Support Analysis LSA which employs set tasks with de
16. We need to consider how each of the user types will use the system Some will create documents and need a method for depositing their work We must also establish whether we need to control work in progress manage changes and issue documents at new versions Some users will need only to view documents in which case how do we control their access The best way to ensure that you have fully understood your users requirements is to interview each of them If you are going to get them to use your new tool or system you heed to get them involved from an early stage System requirements Now we need to think about how the new system and its tools will operate by defining how it interacts with its interfaces This may seem odd but any system interacts with its users and other interfaces In our example the system could also interface with the computer system through a local area network and more widely through an intranet or the Internet We therefore need to check whether there are any specific requirements for this such as choice of operating system In the user requirements we established access privileges for each type of user but at this point we need to think about how such restrictions will work in practice Analysis of the requirements Once we have a clear understanding of the requirements for the project we should be in a better position to start building a picture of what is required of the tool or tools I do this b
17. a new scenario and provide a blank screen on which to type it I have anticipated the various ways they might write each part of the letter and for each have created three or four sample paragraphs of which only one is correct For example the participants are asked to compare the Opening Statement they have written against the first set of sample openings and select the one that most nearly matches their words This process is repeated for the three remaining parts with the software counting their selections and at the end of the exercise directing them to go on to the next unit or to be given additional instruction Evaluating the programme What have we learned about our e learning programme since it went online There have been four main outcomes 1 Companies who have evaluated the programme for their employees find it an efficient learning environment since compared to classroom teaching it does not take employees away from their desks for full day periods They have also found that a good percentage of employees prefer to access the programme from their home computers where they can have an uninterrupted learning experience 2 Our unique software has proved to be educationally sound but it has created a problem for other organisations that want to adopt it or to be more realistic it has created a problem for us For example several major organisations in Europe and the US have wanted to purchase a lice
18. being created revised and edited most of the time There are different types of users all with their own reasons for using the information We might have sales and engineering users each of whom have different needs from the documentation Figure 1 illustrates a systems approach using a flow diagram to show each stage in the process Requirements The first step is to decide on the requirements for the documentation library There are two types of require ments user and system User requirements We start with the user requirements which define how users will interface with the system I always find it useful to start by brainstorming to determine a list of user types and then define how each type will interface with or use the system A set of users for the library might include Sales person Sales engineer Design engineer Production engineer Technical author Graphic designer Project manager Senior manager Printer Each of these types of user will use the library in various ways and this will be reflected in the requirements We need to record the requirements using a simple method such as a spreadsheet or a table and number each one so that it can be cross refer enced from other requirements We do not want to be excessive in defining the requirements we are using the method to enable us to make a better assessment of the tools we need to accomplish a task not conducting a full system design
19. deliver accurate work on time TERMINOLOGY SPECIALISTS build client specific glossaries to guarantee consistency TRANSLATION MEMORY EDITORS re use existing translation to save time and money COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTS research new ways to speed up the translation process SOFTWARE ENGINEERS develop tools and filters to integrate different applications TEST RIGS are built to verify localised software and help text ITR will liaise with your overseas offices for translation acceptance and approval And of course technically accurate excellent translation FOR MORE DETAILS JOHN FISHER OR JANE NOLTING ON 020 8987 8000 PLEASE CALL ITR International Translation Resources Ltd 1 Dolphin Square Edensor Road London W4 2ST Tel 020 8987 8000 Fax 020 8987 8080 E mail info itr co uk Website www itr co uk 6 Presidents notebook Leading by example In my last notebook I rambled on about goals and achievements and concluded that I had managed to achieve my goal of stability and careful growth for the ISTC For someone who is finishing his term as President at the end of the year I should be satisfied with where we are However a recent decision has cast a different light on my situation Council has very kindly asked me to consider extending my term as President and after much discussion and planning with my family I ve decided to accept This decision leaves me with a new dilemma If I have achieved what I set out to do nearly two
20. discern at the size viewed on screen this leaves us with a clear sharp image that fits neatly on a page and is fast to download Each imaging application has its own way of resizing but typically they enable you to specify a new size for the picture measured in pixels Make sure that you maintain the aspect ratio of the picture or it will be distorted to achieve the specified size stretched fio Sa va a CO horizontally or vertically Specify only one dimension for example width and then crop the height as required after resizing is complete Resizing is irreversible so work ona copy of the original image Be wary of resizing graphics especially screen captures aS many contain inadequate detail to produce satis factory results Sharpen the image Sometimes a picture needs sharp ening after resizing to enhance its clarity as described in Better Screen Captures in the Autumn 2003 Communicator Do this at this Stage if necessary Most imaging s 7 KI Ee a ki U lt a oo dF 4 r a yl a i r kn Fi a a r e Sis applications offer other image manipulation tools and if you need to use them now is the time to do so For example you might remove the back ground of the image and flow the text around the subject as shown in Figure 1 Some tools enable you to add special effects to an image such as the pixela tion applied to the photogr
21. each procedure Several different non significant procedures can be shown in a single diagram Based on research by the author a significant procedure in assembly includes unique procedures that have not previously been performed in the assembly process Richardson et al In Press Structural and action diagrams Action diagrams exploded views with arrows and guidelines to indicate attachment are superior to structural diagrams as they specifically depict the fastenings required in the assembly procedures Structural diagrams present the components in their final positions so diagrams CO have to be compared to infer which components have been attached a Orientation Large items such as a wardrobe may be orientated to lie horizontally to ease the physical aspects of assembly Most objects have natural orientations that facilitate object recognition Natural orientations can minimize component positioning errors If these orientations are not used measures should be taken to assist the user in identifying the orientation of the object a Visibility All new components added during a step in the instructions must be visible However in circumstances where there is symmetry there can be exceptions as long as there is confidence that the user is aware of the symmetry Similarly exceptions can be made where multiple identical assembly procedures occur Visibility also requires context for positioning new components t
22. factors that make assembly tasks difficult E mail m richardson derby ac uk Translation Propet Delivery fofteare Localizathon Documenten Projects and information Happing Authors Contract and Permanence om Mj ep itr tar Hirira Yt Surrey GUTI BAF Quadralay launches WebWorks FinalDraft lt m gt WebWorks from Quadralay Corporation This new software aims to give writers a tool for gathering and managing feedback and incorporating changes from multiple reviewers The function ality that FinalDraft offers is designed to address the entire edit and review process from first to final draft giving accurate and complete documents at lower cost and less effort FinalDraft distributes drafts manages discussions and incorporates reviewers feedback It enables the author to distribute drafts in a browser based interface through which reviewers can add comments start discussions and reply to existing discussions Instead of printing out numerous documents keeping track of colours or e mailing different versions to multiple reviewers all drafts are automatically generated from a single Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker document this enables the writer to retain editorial control Using an e mail based system drafts are sent as WebWorks Archive files HTML This requires only a small plug in installed into Microsoft Internet Explorer which is available at no additional cost Reviewers using FinalDraft can part
23. information and process management Document usability Presenting numbers tables and charts Conference provides an opportunity for us to celebrate the very best in our field Technical communication has never been an easy career choice and as market conditions change it will prob ably get tougher So there has never been a better time for us to get together and learn from one another or in other words to expand our horizons Don t miss out on a weekend filled with presentations workshops exhibits receptions and much much more all in relaxed and carefree surroundings among friends For more information please contact me at A Little Creation 67 Carlyon Avenue South Harrow Middlesex HA2 8ST E mail ann alittlecreation co uk or little ann talk21 com Tel Fax 020 8422 4689 IH Ann Little E mail little ann talk21 com The heated indoor swimming pool at the Oxford Belfry an i an i Tt 3 Tr a TTY LI 4 El S STC nes RE Document Design Conference 2004 Noel Reid offers highlights of the research presented on 22 24 January at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands Six years on from the first ever Document Design Conference the follow up saw the presentation of more than 60 papers given by over 100 attendees from Europe North America and South Asia In the main attendees were researchers The second conference continued to correlat
24. it won t cost any extra to attend places are limited so you must book your place in advance If you take advantage of our early bird discount valid to 30 June 2004 at the same time you will save 10 on Conference There s a booking form enclosed with this issue so all you have to do is fill it in and post it K Gavin Ireland MISTC is a sole technical author in a software development company He produces printed PDF and online documentation E mail president istc org uk e OXFORD Reference ONLINE As you know the ISTC has been working with Oxford University Press to introduce an exciting new benefit for members access to Oxford online refer ence material through the ISTC website I m delighted to announce that this service went live in April as planned It provides access to a range of content from Oxford Reference Online Core Collection ORO a facility launched last year and until now sold largely into libraries and educational institutions Content is hosted by OUP and updated when the source content changes but delivered into an ISTC branded template To use the service log into the members area of the ISTC website at www istc org uk Once you are logged in click Members area and then Oxford Reference Online This displays a search page within the ISTC website Enter your search term in the box and click Go This takes you into the ISTC area of the Oxford website giving you access to mo
25. language email mail I loyd co uk tel 44 0 1829 730050 fax 44 0 1829 730060 Lloyd international Translation s web www lloyd co uk KR C OUCOCsC Y N NK N UNCWSW N NW SNXANS The writing process planning In the second of a series of four articles Damien Braniff looks at the planning stage of the writing process Introduction In this article we will be looking at plan ning in the project management sense rather than planning the content of a document The latter planning how to present the information that you gather to the user will be covered in the next article in this series on the writing stage Planning any project documentation or otherwise involves Capturing therequirements and from them defining the scope From the scope working out the types of resource and how much of each is required Deciding how the project will be managed and controlled There is also a broader aspect to plan ning called strategic planning which looks into the future to determine the direction that an organisation needs to take to meet changing requirements and prosper in the future This applies to us as individuals as well influencing how we plan our careers and develop our skills Project planning The level of involvement that the writer has at the planning stage can vary greatly anywhere from 0 100 In a large organisation there will probably be a pr
26. of changes but it is all quite complicated This led to one of those perennial discussions about membership and the need for volunteers to take on speci fied jobs Council is hoping to have the document written in Plain English but decided to seek legal advice before proceeding further Newsletter Talking of volunteers David Cooper is stepping down as Newsletter Editor and there is an urgent need for someone with the skill and time to take up this post I think we can all agree that Dave has done an excellent job with the Newsletter making it something to look forward to reading Finances One bright spot was that the ISTC s bank balance looked after by Treasurer Peter Fountain is in a relatively healthy state compared to the recent past It is sufficiently healthy to allow Council to consider new projects Courses guide John Young who looks after the Education Steering Group is reviewing the list of courses He is finding this slow work because many institutions don t seem keen to get in touch Communications courses which seemed to be on the rise a few years ago are not so common now Although the City amp Guilds 5360 modules are still available they are not well publi cised and students report difficulties in finding convenient exam venues John suggested that this was due toa strange government funding system If I understood correctly colleges that offer a place to a student to take an examin ation
27. on a lithographic printing press The problem Most of the users are proficient in Microsoft Word but they have no practical knowledge of preparing docu ments for print In addition Microsoft Word does not offer any of the prepress functionality that design oriented appli cations offer such as Formatting features to support four colour process or spot colour printing such as CMYK colour palettes and spot colour libraries such as Pantone a Printing functionality to support process colour PostScript Microsoft products use the system level printer to create PostScript which for Windows users means that all colour is converted to RGB Support for page bleeds printer s marks imposition double page spreads or colour separation a Integrated preflight functions The solution A simple single user non automated process is a good place to start Before server solutions are implemented a cheap and flexible partly manual process can help enormously Using Enfocus PitStop can help transform a word processing application into a useful pre press tool The two page document shown in Figure 1 is a typical document designed for print multi column coloured text and coloured graphics A PDF file is made and run through a PitStop preflight test Ideally a customised test is configured to suit your specific needs but one of the generic tests shipped with PitStop can be used Figure 2 Checked documen
28. phase takes the form of a brown paper mapping session This involves bringing together a group of people and drawing a map of the process onto a long roll of brown paper Apart from its practicality as a mapping medium brown paper around the walls has a wonderful effect on a mapping session s participants especially since most of them were probably expecting some high tech approach Preparation Preparation is essential to effective process mapping There are two parts to preparation the first involves having the right tools and materials to hand the second involves having the right people in the right frame of mind in the right place at the right time Putting together a process mapper s toolkit Figure 1 takes care of the first part of preparation We ll consider how the tools are used when we look at the discovery session More difficult to get right is preparing attendees before the session and then getting them to the discovery session keen to participate Firstly we need to decide who are the right people Attendees should Know all or part of the process Want to improve the process Be available on the day It is essential that all participants have the same perspective and the prepara tion must ensure that their viewpoints understanding and aspirations are aligned For these reasons preparation is often referred to as pre positioning A consistent feature of preparing eroups of people for dis
29. reaching a better understanding of your customers needs Visiting your customers and evaluating their experience with your documenta tion is a valuable step in improving your documentation Customer visits enable you to Broaden your understanding of your users knowledge and experience so you can prepare information at a level suitable for your audience Understand user expectations and difficulties with your documentation SO you can create documentation that better meets their needs a Discover the way customers use your products so you can create more realistic examples Learn how customers use and access your documentation so you can improve your delivery methods Improve your ability to evaluate the future direction for documentation a Investigate your customers satisfaction or dissatisfaction in different areas such as content delivery and navigation This article refers to templates that we have used with clients in the US You may need to edit these to suit your target audience but they provide a Starting point You can download the templates from www istc org uk pages members resources customervisits php Ten steps for a successful visit If you have received comments from customers who are unhappy with your documentation set this might be the perfect opportunity to approach them to get their feedback However before you Start calling there are several steps that you need to take 1
30. suggest that the role of the technical author should be redefined as an information designer and the Technical Publications Department should be redefined as the Information Design Department Doing this should help to make it clearer to everyone where their specialist skills making large amounts of unstruc tured information more useful can be applied elsewhere in the organisation IT departments do not have informa tion design skills Quality managers do not have them either and nor do marketing executives or Webmasters The technical author or information designer does have these skills and can offer them to anyone in the organ isation who has to deal with large amounts of unstructured information Along with other similar organis ations Cherryleaf applies its skills outside the technical authoring and software development community For example we work with people who are interested in improving their intranets quality management systems sales proposals and training courseware Therefore there is good reason to believe that these newly named infor mation designers could contribute in a similar way within their own organis ations Carry out usability testing to measure the value of what technical authors produce Some form of measurement needs to take place if you want to place a value on something On www useit com Jakob Nielsen has described how meaningful usability studies can be carried out for a small
31. tempted to say that our favourite tool can do the job This sort of deci sion making process based on gut feeling is not very rational or business like for several reasons There is no attempt to quantify how the tool is used and by whom a We have not looked into the problem we are trying to address in detail We do not know the full requirements for the tool a We have not justified its purchase on the basis of its benefit to the organisation and end users We may be able to use existing tools but have not investigated their use in a quantifiable way So how should you approach this problem To describe the method that I find most useful for large capital invest ment projects and long term strategic planning we need an example situation that many of us will be familiar with or have experienced Documentation library In many organisations there is a need to control the documentation through a unified cohesive user friendly and accessible library At first glance this looks like an easy exercise and your User A Analysis Requirements Specification System Requirements Justification Model Justification Report Figure 1 System design flowchart first thought may be to put the entire document set into a database Well as you will see you might be wrong Systems design A library of company documents is essentially a system and quite a complex one at that Documents are
32. the main documents by the release date with the others to follow Agreeing to release draft documents a Scaling down the scope of the initial release Moving the deadline The number of options available will vary from project to project but almost inevitably some compromises are needed If the technical writers are involved in the early stages of a project then assuming their estimates are taken into account when scheduling the project as a whole compromises can be kept to a minimum Document plans When the schedule for the documenta tion has been agreed including any compromises then you can start to formalise it by creating a document plan for each manual This is to ensure that there is no confusion about what is to be produced with each plan speci fying what the document is the content the delivery date who will produce it and any milestones along the way first draft final edit and so on A document plan for a product will ideally consist of the following sections 1 Title page identifies the product and the current version number of the plan 2 Overview details what the plan is for producing documents for project X and who it is aimed at management customer and so on It should specify the scope of the documentation and any assumptions made or constraints to be met 3 User profile identifies who the user is for each document Remember that not all documents will have the Same reader
33. use of the new system and put the relevant controls in place Business justification The management of a company will always look for Return on Investment ROI when assessing the business case for spending money It is your respon sibility to present this case clearly concentrating on cost savings Savings may be tangible or intangible Tangible cost savings These can be physical for example lower paper printing or storage costs They can also relate to people for example fewer staff or increased productivity Intangible cost savings These include less quantifiable benefits for example easy access to documents better control of the documentation process fewer mistakes improved customer satisfaction and less wasted time Modelling The next step in justification is to put together a financial model I usually use a spreadsheet such as a Microsoft Excel Workbook and build in all the likely costs Then I can adjust the figures as I get more accurate data Using our example project the model may consist of interlinked sheets covering the costs of generating new documents maintaining existing docu ments and employing staff If you have the skill to write some Visual Basic for Applications VBA you could customise the Workbook with ActiveX Controls to adjust some of the variables in the sheets Alternatively you could directly change values to undertake your What if analysis Justification report On
34. we can create a vast array of colours by overprinting cyan magenta and yellow For example we can create red from magenta and yellow However because inks do not behave in an ideal way overprinting can produce slightly unpredictable results Press ready workflow Problem 1 enhancing with colour If you are using Microsoft Office appli cations or authoring programs such as Adobe FrameMaker on a Windows platform all PDF and PostScript files are stored in RGB This is because such applications rely on the system level printer to generate PostScript output rather than generating their own As the Windows graphic display interface GDI only understands the RGB colour space it converts other colour spaces like CMYK or spot colours to RGB This conversion is complex and can distort the colour values If your images consistently use highly saturated colours you may need to consider using a specialist print provider A print provider who has skills in Hi Fi colour or using special ink sets may be able to improve the colour repro duction CO Note Conventional colour printing uses cyan magenta and yellow to reproduce colour information Hi Fi colour systems add green orange and sometimes violet to reproduce colours lost when converting from larger colour gamuts such as RGB Solution Establish a managed workflow where PDF files can be converted to press ready CMYK Products such as Enfocus PitStop can perform t
35. years ago where do I go now As I said before Iain Wright and his Council managed to halt the ISTC s decline and the current Council and I have managed to give stability and gentle growth So the simple answer would be to take the bull by the horns and turn our Institute into the world leading professional associa tion that we all know it can and should be This said the difficult question we then face is how are we going to make it happen With new member benefits like Oxford Reference Online and discounted British Standards plus improved financial stability to quote our accountants It is clear that the Institute has reached a position of financial security confidence is growing Paul Ballard of 3di Information Solutions has joined Council in a marketing role and for the first time I can remember we have two Vice Presidents congratulations to Ian Wood and Alan Fisk Even so the diffi culty that we now face is no longer lack It is clear that the Institute has reached a position of financial security of money but lack of volunteers All our Council and Steering Group members are stretched to the limit and unable to take on any more responsibilities I think you ve probably guessed what I m building up to I ve said it before but your Institute needs you Even if you can only spare an hour a week or less we can put that time to good use Speaking personally although my Presidency
36. your crystal balls In this issue you ll find several features that relate to the nature of our role as technical communicators and the devel opments that we re seeing in different sectors of business This is something that affects how the ISTC positions itself and the criteria that it sets for membership On pages 19 21 Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf asks if the role of technical author as we know it is dead The title he proposes information designer is already used by some organisations along with information developer However when I spoke to Ellis at a recent London Group meeting he said that Cherryleaf still tends to refer to most practitioners as technical authors or writers because this is the term that its clients understand The question of job titles leads into another thorny area how should the ISTC define a scientific or technical communicator So many titles devel oped in the last third of the 20 century that the Membership Committee now has to look beyond job titles to judge whether applicants are tech nical communicators For example there has recently been interest in the Institute from Integrated Logistics Support ILS engineers On pages 16 18 Tom Nicholas and Velma Parker of TMS Publications give an overview of ILS engineering In coming issues of Communicator articles on documenta tion in the defence industry will explore this sector in more detail From yet another perspective Florence Duj
37. 12 Retired 4030 Notes 1 The concession rate is applied for the first year of student membership only 2 Retired rate available on request to members over the state retirement age Peter Fountain FISTC LCGI E mail treasurer istc org uk Les Best FISTC E mail lpbest clara net Goa a Ze ia H E A a s sa E JA Fa La ee D g iy U JJ LS E uJ 7 E ww wy LA 1 Sa Sa fe 4 U S os oS L AR E Besa d um u I rAIlll E E f IH U a o wv i ww OE O http groups yahoo com group ISTC Discussion Language and symbols Some discussion took place concerning how to include a tick or check symbol in HTML Using Microsoft Word select the font Zapf Dingbats and depress the character 4 on the keyboard Another way using Word is to select Insert on the toolbar then select symbol and the font Zapf Dingbats On the 20th box of row 1 there is a different style of tick available Click on this Another approach which does not reguire a font to be available is to select an image for the bullet You can do this using a definition list although you won t get a hanging indent lt DL gt lt DD gt lt imgsrc yourimage gif gt text lt DD gt lt DL gt When to use the TM symbol It is a good idea to include this to tell the audience that a term is the client s unregistered trademark and to respect that There is then n
38. C suffix found the Federation Internationale Sportive de Traineau a Chiens a group for sporting sled dog trainers that took me back to our Spring 2001 cover picture Still at least Fellowship became a topic of discussion A report in the May ISTC Newsletter highlighted that job applicants are falsely claiming membership so do check when recruiting Ask for a current membership card not a certificate which shows only that that a person joined at some time in the past El Marian Newell FISTC is a freelance technical author working in the Thames Valley She has been a member of the ISTC since 1985 E mail journal editor istc org uk Letters ey 5 Reusability under the SCORM Dirk Manuel MISTC I enjoyed John Burns s article on the SCORM Learning Objects and the SCORM in the Spring 2004 issue of Communicator However I think that Mr Burns slightly mis stated the reusability component of the SCORM model Mr Burns states that learning objects help users to define and construct their own e learning courses implying that the reusability is on the part of the user As I understand it the reusability is actu ally on the part of the author or better content developer There are two levels of re use in a SCORM compliant development environment Content developers can combine previously created assets into Shareable Content Objects SCOs and can also combine SCOs into new courses via a manifest as de
39. Khoo Ellis is a Documentation Architect on the project Website www oracle com E mail lyop tek khoo ellis oracle com Francisco Abedrabbo oracle com suo1 njos Bulules esp We recognise that one size doesn t fit all If our standard off the peg courses are not precisely what you are looking for we ll happily tailor a course to suit your need It s sew easy CONTACT US Tel 01295 201240 email enquiries its ideal co uk www its ideal co uk Mercia House A Adobe South Bar Banbury Solutions Network Oxon Certified Training Provider 0X16 9AB 14 Careers 4 Careers Moving into usability work Is it possible Florence Dujardin argues that yes it is but technical communicators need some career development Many technical communicators report an interest in usability In their yearly surveys of skills the WritersUA asso ciation found that about half their respondents consider usability testing as invaluable or very valuable However this interest is not matched by opportunities for usability work This article seeks to make a case for technical writers legitimate claim by considering elements of their practice that are of direct relevance to usability and by identifying areas for essential career development Start with user task analysis Can user task analysis be a key to usa bility work This may seem surprising since it is very obviously linked with the early phases of a project whi
40. Peat your ercap to hanch and give you a gitt zonu of the questions we plan to ask ichide Are the manuals accurate Are they easy to use How do you like the frat size and appearance of our Inanuals How do you use oar Tnanuals Do you use online manuals If so how do you like ther Are you satisfied with the existing methods of submitina comment and raei irg updates for our Manuals Are your orders for documentation fled promptly Thank you in adyan for helping ws improve our documentation I look forward to POUL response RirstlJame LaslJame Phone MNurnikber Figure 1 Customer contact letter going and see if the customers are willing to participate After locating willing customers send them an e mail or letter of introduction Customer Contact Letter template If a customer wants to know more about the questions that you plan to ask you can send them the questionnaire before the visit Questionnaire template 5 Deciding who goes The writer of the book in question the documentation manager and a note taker should go on the visit No more than four people should visit the customer You can rotate writers to visit different customers On subsequent visits make sure you have at least one individual who has done a customer visit and can take the lead 6 Preparing for your visit Here are some things to do Identify the topics that you want to cover Send a confi
41. a single operation Select the central area of the button and use the Flood Fill tool to give a light graduated fill Figure 3c The example uses a graduated semi transparent fill in a shade that complements the button border colour but you can adjust this to suit your preferences 6 If you need more than one button save your work at this point to create a master Use a lossless file format such as BMP GIF or Paint Shop Pro s native format 7 Use the Text tool to add the button text Figure 3d For best results select a sans serif font and anti aliasing of the text 8 Save the graphic as a GIF file to preserve the sharpness of the edges 9 Optional Create additional tinted versions of the button for use on the web page to indicate that the button is live See the button under the cursor in Figure 1 The browser will change the tint of the button when the cursor is hovered over it or when it is selected Use the Colorise menu option to alter button colour in a single operation Designing your own buttons and other graphics in this way enables you to make your website more individual and more appropriate to its content is Systems Manager at Imprimatur Ltd Imprimatur specialises in technical translation and documentation and is linguistic partner to IBM Formerly of Interleaf in the UK and US Philip has 15 years experience in technical documentation and translation tools E mail philip randall
42. a and New Zealand tend to adopt UK conventions while parts of the Far East show more US influence Canada is a special case with historical British influence but close American links Several times checking one of the larger local dictionaries showed that a word variant while not common was grammatically correct in a region The Guidelines are intended to develop to address feedback from technical communicators around the world Please send your comments to Ron Blicq at ronblicq cs com Marian Newell FISTC journal editor istc org uk Isabella Raper Zullig MIT Technical Translator English German in conjunction with Paul Raper MASI ABENG AMIIE Tel 0041 71 4600356 e mail info raper zullig com International standards ISO IEC 15910 1999 Software user documentation process Although international standards can be prepared as new documents they can also be adapted from existing national or industry standards For example ISO IEC 18019 2004 Guidelines for the design and preparation of user docu mentation for application software was developed from two British Standards that addressed software documentation BS 7649 1993 and BS 7830 1996 Similarly ISO IEC 15910 1999 Software user documentation process was adapted from the Australian and New Zealand Standard AS NZS 4258 which was published in 1994 Phil Cohen FISTC of HCi in Sydney Australia was the editor of ISO IEC 15910 which is curren
43. adings and a brief synopsis of what each will contain All this gives you a feeling for how difficult each document will be to produce and how much work is involved It also allows you to create a ballpark figure for the size of each document and to produce a rough esti mate of the number of pages that need to be produced Schedule This is a bit of the process with which the writer often has too little involve ment In many places I ve worked scheduling has ranged from we need it by to do you think three weeks will be enough for this Oh and by the way we need everything delivered at the same time To create a workable schedule you first of all need to know how long it will take to produce the documents Van Laan and Julian 2001 state that the time to create any given document can be calculated using the formula shown in Figure 1 If you ve got your estimates fairly close that comes with experience you ll have a good idea of how long the project will take always err on the safe side As a general rule of thumb for creating new documents through first draft to final version Van Laan and Julian suggest Ten hours per page for highest quality documentation a Seven hours per page for documents people need and use Three to six hours per page for minimally usable documentation Now you have estimated the time it will take to produce the documents you can create your schedule T
44. all interested parties the develop once use many times principle This is achieved through a shared data environment commonly referred to as a Logistic Support Analysis Record LSAR a Common Source Data Base CSDB or a Supportability Data Base By whatever name it is assigned it is a data repository used by the engineering and ILS disciplines Def Stan 00 60 defines the logistic analysis process in what is known as the LSA 100 500 Task Series Without going into great detail let us just say that these tasks are fundamental to the planning execution and documentation of the overall ILS LSA programme Analytical techniques are employed in the development of data that influence the content of technical documentation and training material Analysis includes but is not limited to Eiri Friii LS RE COA NESULT Sue Pat in Wy isan TRANH WATER S Figure 3 Typical LSAR outputs TEC RMAC AL DOC LWA STATE 3 mr ONCE d HOO 33 F ee aa ETTIET SSAC Tie Tee a PEEL al Bonnin Pee WON TAT Te Bha hi TERA POLE we TS PEGG AC u PA Abra dip eee idu TA Era Nj g AAT E k TE SC CASES ELHA D TAIS E TE LT PLAG k RRA APNE RTS Oe Peo HL PO eg Te TECHS AL PULTE SUPPLY TUFPPORT Al Cee MONTE Figure 4 Simplified ILS process Do we have a relationship The purpose of this article was to provide a brief explana
45. aller showcased a number of transactional documents such as utility bills examining the use of language branding in creating and maintaining relationships with customers Electronic documents The seven threads in this track took attendees from commercial website design to designing hypertext menus and visual elements in electronic documents Alfons Maes connected hyperlinks with cognition and usability research Thea van der Geest and Nicole The use of promotional language in press releases Henk Pander Maat Utrecht University Writers of press releases are often advised to avoid explicit promotional language it is assumed that journal ists are wary of attempts to obtain free publicity and so this study addresses two questions what linguistic elements can be considered as promotional language and do journalists actually remove obvious self promotional language when rewriting releases for publication A coding scheme was developed distinguishing between thirteen promotional devices Examples were intensifying quantifiers and adverbs such as all or enormously A corpus of 43 press releases in one niche market was assembled The 847 sentences contained 557 promotional elements A field study examined how journalists reworked these press releases into stories In about 80 of cases promotional elements were retained or replaced by others Loorbach examined how visual elements such as fon
46. alone is not the whole problem however As the old saying goes a picture is worth ten thousand words and even the writers of the pop song thought it painted a thou sand words Anyone who has had to read a patent specification will readily vouch for the truth of that The intel lectual effort needed to understand the meaning of a thousand grammati cally linked words and the incomplete or even inaccurate impression that often results is wholly out of propor tion to the much fuller understanding provided by just a glance at a good drawing Lost for words So although words can be defined in an effort to increase clarity situations can arise where the right words simply do not exist Imagine the problems a colleague of mine faced when she had to translate a tourist brochure about North Wales into Dutch a language honed in an environment where there is hardly a hill to be seen is ill equipped to wax eloquent about the varieties of mountain scenery There can be a great gulf between even closely related cultures the British and the Americans frequently fail to understand each other and these are two cultures that separated only some 200 years ago and have kept closely in touch ever since The longer it has been since a common base was shared the greater the disparity becomes in the use of language English shares about 60 of its vocabulary with the Latin languages but it is dangerous to assume that apparently i
47. amount of effort So test to see what happens if users do not have any documentation and how they react to different types of user assistance Get involved in the develooment of new software at an earlier stage As online user assistance becomes more tightly integrated with the software the technical author will need to be more tightly integrated with the development of the software right from the begin ning of the process assessed Acquire the additional skills needed The role today requires more than just writing It requires skills in online information design and usability In the future it could require skills in writing JavaScript and developing e learning content However some of the need to hack into code can probably be avoided if you use the most popular Help authoring tools These developments in the role probably mean more training is required for technical authors Use the right tools for the job The latest software from the main software vendors in this field provides more than just an authoring environ ment Many tools now include content management e learning scripting and support for output across a range of media The vendors seem to have a good appreciation of the key issues surrounding the provision of user assistance and large documents SHU Phone il al PET a Fa 3 la 4 7 4 s SEM NA A I AACE a pa q ale y We EALS I 1U 20 Careers Careers Conclusi
48. an therefore display effectively when the white point has been adjusted Use a software calibration tool to neutralise the colour balance of the monitor display An example is Adobe Gamma which is installed with Adobe Photoshop This tool calibrates and characterises your monitor and creates an ICC profile a set of instructions that describe the performance of devices like monitors and printers You should select 6500K as the white point and use the default gamma for your operating system 1 8 for the Macintosh and 2 2 for Windows If you deliver print ready PDF files use the Preview and Overprint functions in Adobe Acrobat not the Reader to see an approximation of v v the final printed appearance To use these functions effectively you must optimise your monitor as described above and configure Acrobat for colour management Select Edit gt Preferences gt General Select Colour Management Unless you have a specification for the print process select European Prepress Defaults or another generic standard To use Preview select Advanced gt Preview This approximates the appearance of the printed work and can give a good indication of how bright colours may become de satu rated during printing To use Overprint select Advanced gt Overprint This shows how the inks used in printing behave when they are superimposed on the page Because the inks are designed to be transparent
49. and Embedded Software Engineer he has also had management experience and run his own consultancy company Prior to his current role he was System Designer for Simoco on their TETRA Mobile Radio system and was responsible for technical design documentation E mail john_rodgers ntlworld com Experienced lime Language Translation Specialists 120 plus languages irasalao hanu Qualified native in country linguists Text website software translation In house PC Mac D T P Services Professional Project Management Glossaries Translation Memories Document Management Consultancy Francis or John 01954 212902 info limetranslations com www limetranslations com _32 Methods O Process mapping Chris Pearson looks at the practical aspects of running a process mapping session and creating process documentation In part one of this series we looked at some situations in which we might map a process how we might map it and the process elements that we can represent We also considered how the process detail that we capture can be used in the context of a wider process docu mentation exercise In this second part we will look at mapping in practice In the sequence of activities that makes up process documentation the steps we need to take are Preparation m Discovery Mapping Documentation The approach described is very prag matic It reflects a number of lessons that were learned the hard way The discovery
50. and and good roads one can work wherever one wants Budget The last budget saw Gordon Brown s threat to tax small limited companies prove to be much less onerous than the accountancy profession expected with a 19 tax on the first 10 000 profit This reversed an earlier change where the first 10 000 was tax free but the Treasury has yet to announce changes to the regulations on the distribution of shares between husband and wife for small owner managed companies The Inland Revenue recently interpreted an s 8 LEE ee PGC gay a SG fi u u sili eae im d a F we F wD T _ IM PAU d KA yea LA MM RA ZA pA FON a mm ee as A U B ki IL _ s 4 i U i T mm U i a ki fat E d Ca dU q il w Nae we T Ki w v E GE Vy i I aS a U wd amp u u SE x a Vr EU tw http roups yahoo com group ISTC_IASIG old tax law so that if a husband and wife have egual shares in a company but only one of them earns the money all the shareholders will be deemed to be working partners and taxed accordingly There is a test case in June on behalf of a contractor who is facing a claim from the Inland Revenue for 43 000 in tax back dated for six years The outcome of this test case could affect freelance technical authors who work through a limited company Raising our profile On a more light hearted note Jean Rollinson wrote Last week I watched the Professionals version
51. aph on the cover of this issue Set the transparent colour Many images on websites are transparent Figure 2 illustrates this the horse icons on the left hand side of the map are not transparent and the ones on the right hand side are and look better for it Photographic images do not work well with a transparent colour but graphics often do Your imaging application will provide a facility for setting a transparent colour doing this will mean you must save your file in GIF format which supports transparency SO you Will be limited to 256 colours in the file see below Save the image to disk Decide on an appropriate format for the image Typical formats for web pages are GIF or JPEG but be aware that they are very different Graphics images like the map in Figure 2 should be saved as a GIF file This produces a small file size and no image information is lost GIF is said to be lossless This format is especially efficient when large numbers of pixels within an image are of the same colour typical of screen captures graphic buttons separator bars and logos JPEG struggles with the hard edges that are common in line drawings and graphics tending to blur them GIF only supports 256 colours 8 bits pixel unsuitable for photographic images but this should be sufficient for most graphics that will appear on a web page A GIF file should be smaller than a JPEG file for a typical graphic image Photogra
52. ardin writes on pages 14 15 about the skills shortage in usability testing and suggests technical communicators can extend their skills to fill this role Do those of us writing instructions think enough about how effective our materials are Are we aware of the latest ideas and research in this field These issues affect us as individuals and the ISTC as an organisation I encourage you to read these articles and think about your views and experience Send in your observations of how tech nical communication is being done in practice and how you see practitioners adapting to meet new requirements What do you need from the ISTC and how do you think the Institute needs to evolve I would be especially interested to hear from readers whose jobs have broadened into multi disciplinary roles for example to include testing as we are considering a series of articles on this development All of this ties in neatly with the theme of this year s Conference Expanding your Horizons This is a chance to meet other technical commu nicators and talk about the issues that affect you Judging by the lively discus sion debate and even argument at the London Group meeting people have plenty to say on what we do and what we should be doing Conference offers a far larger forum for these discussions the chance to meet people in your field and perhaps still more valuable people outside it I get the odd complaint that there is t
53. are E mail j d_braniff yahoo co uk Bedford Translations your language Translation of manuals DTP in your Preferred Application Localisation of your Software Globalisation of your Website Using native speaking experts our teams work with technical authors in major corporations worldwide ta ensure that their customers get accurate and effective messages In any discipline wWwww bedtroratrans co uk 19 192 St Andrews Road Bedford MKAD 2LL Tek 4400254 271555 Fax AAOH 271556 sales bedtordtrans co uk 38 Research Research Cognition and diagrams Miles Richardson discusses how current research in cognitive psychology can inform the design of diagrammatic instructions For many years psychologists have studied instruction design and consid ered the media and methods used to convey information and in particular the relative benefits of diagrams and text The addition of diagrams that depict operational spatial and contex tual information improves performance and facilitates learning although textual information is important for accuracy Despite the benefits of textual informa tion illustration only or diagrammatic instructions have become increasingly widespread because they reduce transla tion costs Cognitive scientists and psychologists have investigated the general role of diagrams and the cognitive processes involved when people use diagrammatic representations of a task This research into diagrammat
54. articipants respond to a question that demands a quantitative or definitive answer deter mining whether the answer is correct and scoring it is relatively straight forward Measuring participants writing capability is significantly more difficult Our programme does this in several ways two of which I describe here Course 5 teaches how to write a complaint letter It describes a situation that calls for participants to make a claim or lodge a complaint The course does it in two ways Measurement by selection To demonstrate that the participant has understood the information and concepts the program questions the participant separately about each part of the complaint letter 1 The Opening Statement 2 The Background to the situation 3 The Complaint Details 4 The Action Statement For example to test how the Opening Statement should be written the programme presents between four or 24 e Learning e Learning five possible openings and asks partici pants to select the most appropriate Their choices identify their level of comprehension This process is repeated for the remaining three parts of the letter In each case the software counts the choice and progressively accumulates a score that is used to measure whether they should go on to the next unit or be given additional instruction Measurement by comparison To test course participants ability to write their own complaint letter I present
55. ation and uses familiar language taking care to anticipate any ambiguities C Graham Cross MSc MISTC FITI is a freelance scientific and technical translator from the Latin languages and former Chairman of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting E mail graham trinity btconnect com How long have you worked in technical communication I ve been a professional technical writer for just over nine years As a freelance I tend to call myself a technical writer or technical author it s the term that my potential clients understand What do you do I help software companies to reduce their customer support costs How By writing clear instructions for their software The result is that customers don t call the help desk as often as they used to There s a case study on www techscribe co uk techw cssdl htm How did you start as an author It s a third career for me I left school at 16 and started my working life as an industrial paint chemist I later went to university decided not to return to chemistry and taught English as a foreign language instead which took me to Turkey and Saudi Arabia Eventually my interest in computing took me back into full time education studying an MSc in Software Systems Technology at Sheffield University By chance I then had the opportunity to pursue a PhD in theoretical computer science my thesis on file partitioning in multi processor database machines is at
56. authoring tool The yearly subscription includes automatic access to FREE Enhancements FREE New Version Releases FREE New Features FREE Service Releases FREE 30 Day Phone Support FREE E mail Support Subscription Offers Savings of up to 465 on Training and Support 495 660 99 e Introductory Course 660 e Upgrade from 2000 Course 935 e Yearly Telephone Support 125 IRL FF CCIONA UT I N and Upgrade from 2000 training courses learn best practices and recommended tips f SDIJIN e y from recognized industry experts For the latest schedule and to reserve your seat today 3 l aasi in mm visit www componentone co uk training Er T ea VISIT OUR WEB SITE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE TRIAL www componentone co uk Ve Onsite training is also available directly from our Certified Consultants For more information please visit www componentone co uk consultants Ri Oer Ta ee COCE GE Pe SALES 0800 328 5271 44 0 1460 234636 More Tools Endless Possibilities 1991 2004 ComponentOne LLC All rights reserved All product names are owned by their respective owners Componentes C1 30 Tools RE Choosing the right tools John Rodgers looks at a simple analysis technique to help in selecting the correct documentation tools for your organisation When approached to solve a problem in an organisation that involves the use of new or existing computer tools we can be
57. book Figure 4 Buy a book in Structured English Figure 3 Buy a book shown graphically contents of each BOOK entry including ISBN in each BOOK s BOOK DETAIL The tight syntax and the layout of Structured English is similar to a programming language and its appear ance will be familiar to anyone who has even glanced at code for software It is intended to be clear concise and unambiguous and may be refined for particular usage The key unit of Structured English is known as an imperative sentence This consists an imperative verb followed by one or more process objects linked by connectors on which the verb operates A common convention is to use lower case for these words It is advisable to define a list of these verbs and stick with them rather than using unspecific terms and catch all verbs such as m Process Handle Deal with Eradicate Understand Defining a list of verbs enables you to select relevant verbs for the context perhaps using industry specific terms to make the documentation clearer and more concise Imperative sentences that represent individual process elements are often grouped together into process segment blocks usually using a BEGIN and END construct For example BEGIN order update END order update Since a process is triggered by an event a construct is required to represent the trigger and terminator shown on a process map There should be only one t
58. ce you have all your requirements and your final justification analysis it is time to compile all this information into a report The report might justify capital expenditure on new tools or instead focus on changing procedures The final document should be brief giving a synopsis of your investigations rather than a full account of all your results You can always reference the detailed work and its location so that it can be consulted if required However you should state your conclusions in full because you need to convey the whole of the justifica tion in monetary and efficacy terms Ensure too that control of the new system and any changes in responsi bility are covered thoroughly Specify any management related changes because you do not want there to be any surprises but be careful how you write this information be diplomatic Bear in mind that you may not have the final responsibility of implementing the suggested changes you are only the advisor or consultant If you work in an ISO 9000 environ ment that will offer a basis for making changes to procedures If you succeed in justifying the purchase of a new tool the new procedures will also need to comply with the requirements of quality management Appropriateness of approach As I stated in the introduction to this article I use this method for major capital investment and long term plan ning Some of you may think that it is not really necessary for sho
59. consumes a lot of my time for no financial reward it gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction to know that I m contributing to the ISTC s success I can t say for certain but I m fairly confident that it hasn t done my employment prospects any harm either I have been thinking about projects that we might undertake when we have the people to tackle them and I ve had some suggestions from other people too I must add that these are still just thoughts not necessarily supported by Council but here are a few ideas A new ISTC publication The idea of updating and rewriting the 1980s ISTC handbook as a textbook for students of technical communication courses has been suggested An alternative might be a desktop reference book for practising technical communicators More ISTC events The annual Conference is popular and successful Should we develop more events throughout the year Perhaps we could work with other similar organisations to run joint events ISTC training and certification Past ISTC courses have had limited success but perhaps something new like an entry level distance learning course for technical communicators could work better Our friends and colleagues in tekom Germany have just established a certification scheme and perhaps we can learn from their experiences Working with related organisations Recently there has been discussion about other trades that might also fit under the umbrella of sc
60. covery sessions is that more senior members of an organisation often require far more pre positioning than those working at the coalface Preparation should include discussing some basic rules that will be strictly enforced on the day How the map will be created Conventions to be used Commitment to the discovery session No drifting in and out No phones No messages gt No interruptions a Safe environment with respect for confidentiality No judgement Unresolved issues will be quickly parked a The session will be enjoyable Ensure each attendee has a written reminder of the discovery session where when and how long Phone them a week before and then again a day before If you have an art tube a telescopic art carrier made by Staedtler Linex and others use that to bring the paper to the session and to take it away at the end Process mapper s toolkit Brown paper Scissors Knife Masking tape A4 paper Spray mount Marker pens Pens and pencils Rule Art tube Flip chart or whiteboard Figure 1 The right tools Before the attendees arrive make ready the venue 1 Take down any pictures from the walls and unroll the brown paper 2 Test the masking tape on an inconspicuous part of the wall to ensure that the room doesn t require redecoration at the close of the mapping session The brown paper should be stout heavy gauge parcel wrapping paper partly for durability
61. cs agfa com packaging workflow apogeex_light www adobe com www creativepro com www enfocus com www iproofsystems com www markzware com www mekon com www pdf x com Trademarks All trademarks cited in this article are the property of the trademark holders Lewis Marshall is a Senior Design Technologist at Vektas Ltd He has worked in print graphic reproduction and publishing industries for 12 years E mail lewis marshall vektas com 46 Hints for writers Forming plurals in English Nick Robson looks at how plurals are formed depending on the ending of the singular form The English language being what it is the formation of plurals can be a mine field and added to this tastes change Once one s own preferences have been added in confusion can easily reign Logical English is not The following top ten is only a sample of the variations that you may encounter In practice be consistent with endings if there is a choice espe cially if your writing is to be translated 1 A ex ix on um and us Annex annexes Antenna antennae or antennas Appendix appendices UK English appendixes US English Apex apexes Bacterium bacteria Criterion criteria often used wrongly as a singular Datum in the sense of reference points use datums In the sense of information use data Forum strictly fora but this can sound pretentious so go for forums Formula formulae or formulas the latter gene
62. d output Documentation In the first article in this series we considered the final documentation as being the graphical map or maps combined with structured process descriptions Ambiguities arise in natural language These are the bread and butter of many comedy scripts but the purpose of process documentation is to represent a process accurately and concisely without ambiguity or jokes One solution is to use structured language in our case Structured English This replaces loose verbal descriptions with a stricter tighter syntax It benefits from using an acces sible English narrative to describe a series of logically related activities To illustrate the transition from a graphical process map to a Structured English description let s consider a process segment from the Required reading process Figure 3 The Buy a book segment was created after being told We do a search on Amazon for each book left on the list after borrowing as many as possible using the ISBN and if it s in the search results buy it with one click Figure 4 shows this expressed in Structured English We have included the sample document BOOK LIST in the documentation and have listed the 34 Methods Methods BEGIN buy a book get BOOK from BOOK LIST search AMAZON for BOOK by ISBN FOR EACH SEARCH RESULT IF SEARCH RESULT matches BOOK DETAIL THEN click on Buy now with one click button END IF NEXT SEARCH RESULT END buy a
63. d fountain provides the focal point around which the conference rooms are arranged Having undergone a multi million pound refur bishment the Oxford Belfry is a superb four star hotel conveniently situated just off the M40 This year our theme is Expanding your Horizons As always Conference provides the perfect opportunity for thought provoking debate stimulating delegates with new ideas that will lead to long term improvement One of the best ways to make progress is to learn from the experience of others With that in mind imagine two days during which some of the best brains and person alities in the industry join together to share ideas and knowledge Expanding Your Horizons is designed to challenge every delegate to rethink and re evaluate both their job and themselves in the face of a fast changing marketplace In putting together the programme we have tried to cover some of the strategic and everyday issues that we face as well as covering technical communication as a whole A new item this year is an Indexing Workshop on the Saturday morning hosted by Derek Copson of the Society of Indexers and aimed specifically at technical communicators This prom ises to be a useful new addition to a programme that already includes presentations from speakers who are leaders in their fields They will be addressing a wide variety of topics for example Expanding your writing horizons Standards in
64. d text set to less than 4pt Fonts that are not embedded or may substitute on the output device a Printable PDF annotations The distinction between preflighting and postflighting is subtle and both are commonly referred to as preflighting Use of either or both is a safeguard against re work and lost deadlines and both raise issues to consider Preflighting Preflighting checks can offer valuable warnings that can be corrected by the document creator However there are few off the shelf products on the market espe cially for authoring applications such as Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker Adobe Acrobat Professional includes preflighting checks but offers Glossary Bleeds a printed image that extends beyond one or more of the page margins this is later trimmed so that the image bleeds off the edge of the sheet Colour separation the act of separating a document into components for printing usually four parts for process printing Double page spreads two facing pages that allow common objects to fall across the inside margins of both pages Double page spreads are supported by most DTP tools including PageMaker QuarkXPress and InDesign Four colour process full colour simulated by over printing cyan magenta yellow and black Gamma a measure of brightness for the mid tone values produced by a device often a monitor Hairline a variable line weight defined by the output device it creates the
65. dentical words have the same meaning Take for example the Portuguese word identidade it means identity in English and in many cases it is used exactly like its English counterpart Consider however a Portuguese sentence that translates literally as The report proves the identity of A and B The English reader understands that the report proves who or what A and B are Right No sorry wrong What the sentence means is that A and B are proved to be identical that is the same the context in which information is communicated and that he or she is on their wavelength Context can alter the meaning of words especially where words in normal use have specialist meanings in a particular discipline Even experts struggle when a text simply doesn t speak their language even though they are fully familiar with its technical content In all these ways then if a text does not meet readers expectations anything that causes hesitation or a stumble will damage their confidence in the writer The initial response may only be a raised eyebrow but persistent failure to meet expectations will eventually elicit a hostile reaction in which the reader expects not to understand and may even almost deliberately fail to take in the message Both technical writers and translators face these difficulties and anything that causes hesitation or a stumble will damage their confidence in the writer Readers e
66. e the online Help that will ship with the next release of Windows code name Longhorn may look more like a website or a Web based learning system than the type of Help files we currently see This means that some technical authors feel they are being crowded out and losing their jobs as their work is taken on by others within the organisation The work can be done in other ways From time to time new software or technology comes out that leads some technology evangelists to claim you can do away with the need for man made user assistance Common themes appear and reappear with each tech nology wave with people claiming that a Software can be made that is so intuitive to use that users will never need online Help Programmers can write the documentation to the standard needed Special software can be used to create user assistance by looking at the lines of code Information can be dumped into an information store and special search software can be used to retrieve the information that people need Computer based tutorials can provide all the assistance that people need lt is a specialist and lonely job Many are in environments where they are the only technical author in their organisation and this can mean their career path is unclear or limited Their contribution to the business can be uncertain Some people perceive what technical authors produce to be a necessary evil something that needs to be
67. e in Microsoft Paint which comes as part of all Microsoft operating systems Preparing an image for use Photographs and graphics can be obtained ready to use from several sources perhaps the most accessible of which is Microsoft s excellent online clipart gallery This mostly contains graphics such as the horse logo used in Figures 1 and 2 and the map itself in Figure 2 but there are photo graphs too These are all provided at no cost and without usage restrictions For more Racecourse Services Limited biel orre En Shap mpri oi irri ie eee star te Searcy Vi p Pari cies al moa icti eea aan sophisticated photo dared Piira graphic material try a Leg ia i R a the online galley of Of tar ee ed ee E Comedia TT renga clay ad dor you a re ae Peay Pee Pete E Seeker ce ce ee mie Pazara pao Getty Images www gettyimages co uk the photography on this kik Gt el d ee ie Ol eo A i Maer pirati ene zo site must be paid for artare ee but is of the highest Whether the image Fi 1 Usi impl hics on a web page igure 1 Using simple graphi webD pag J is a photograph or graphic the method of preparing it for use is broadly similar and described in the following sections Crop the image The first step is to obtain exactly the image that you want to use There is no point in resizing and manipulating an image only to find you then need to crop it for compo
68. e is changing the system so that small incorporated businesses pay the right amount of tax which is of course more It looks like a stitch up to me read more at http news bbc co uk 1 hi business 3535749 stm Another example is unsolicited commercial email UCE which has been the subject of EU regulation Now we have guidelines under which we can legally send UCE to businesses However I haven t been able to find a single ISP that allows me to send UCE under the terms of the contract So what is the point of the bureacrats spending my tax money to define rules when contract law prevents me from sending UCE How would you like to see the ISTC develop I think the Institute needs a greater focus on business issues faster response times and less reliance on volunteers It must grow and reach out to more technical communicators Why did you upgrade to Fellow In a competitive market you need an edge It s great that I can tell potential clients I m a Fellow it shows that I m serious about being the best I can be What might you rather do In my fantasy world I would be a boat builder wooden craft I really like wood the feel the smell Putting it together to make a big toy would be good fun G Te Had enough of Document Review Draft V6 Bea CIM ome EU From Joam ean Paragraph 4 p 6 word 9 14 17 33 68 43 spelling Paragraph 4 product name excludes moD NONE a eo cme omeogemeera
69. e reasons for this will become evident as you read on First of all we need to clarify the viewpoint of the authors This article draws upon the professional experi ence of TMS Support Solutions Limited TMS a company that provides both ILS services and technical documentation particularly within the defence industry The employment of technical authors illustrators and multimedia developers plays an important role in meeting the requirements of technical commu nication However this is not fully representative of the big picture Technical documentation and training material can take on many forms and be prepared for the purposes of different target audiences These products will in most instances be the result or output of an ILS process This is certainly true of all projects undertaken in the defence industry and applies to an increasing percentage of projects under taken in commercial industry To help you understand this rela tionship fully we must take you ona journey into the world of ILS So what is ILS For the purposes of explaining the ILS process and the elements within it we will adhere to the terminology used by the UK MoD and the defence industry ILS is a structured and disciplined process devised to manage the Whole Life Costs WLC of any specified equipment or product The objective is to optimise WLC by minimising the support infrastructure required for the equipment or product through inf
70. e research with practice in the field of document design Accordingly to provide perspective and achieve a balance both researchers and practi tioners presented papers In the words of the organising committee the focus was on organi sational communication from a cognitive psychological institutional and intercultural perspective There were four concurrent tracks Methods for the study of document design Rhetoric and persuasion a Institutional documents Electronic documents Reading and expertise the impact of connectives on comprehension of texts in the financial field Nicolas Roebben and Yves Bestgen Catholic University of Louvain Belgium Studies have shown that high knowledge readers learn more from low coher ence texts than high coherence texts whereas low knowledge readers act in reverse Low coherence texts force high knowledge readers to use their prior knowledge to fill in the conceptual gaps Levels of coherence were measured by the presence of causal connectives Subjects were divided into two groups according to their niche of interest and tested on four texts the variables being the presence or absence of connectives and the exact subject of the text The conclusions of the study were 1 High expertise level readers always performed better than low expertise level readers 2 The presence of connectives in texts improved mental representation of low and high expertise level readers
71. e rest Gradually a detailed representation of the process will develop probably with individual participants becoming more enthusiastic adding detail and depth as disagreements are argued through The facilitator is an essential element in directing this process and main taining order and focus The facilitator may need to excel in the role to resolve disputes between people carrying out Type Full process Cross Relationship process tasks and map functional map managers who think process map they know how the Sema Tasks Tasks by Process as tasks are handled In Inputs function customer this instance diligent Outputs supplier Sequence transactions preparation and pre l o inks Focus Process detail Tasks and roles Context of the positioning will pay enterprise off h Level Most detailed Some Least detailed When a process aggregation big picture map becomes intricate or apparently Table 1 Types of process maps incoherent making a few ad hoc sketches on a separate piece of paper can be a useful technique Do not however be drawn into using alternative convenient symbols or logical constructs on the process map itself stick with the seven basic symbols shown in the previous article Sometimes there will be issues that cannot be resolved They should be parked and the session allowed to move forward Making a record of an issue ensures that it is not forgotten giving it time and recognitio
72. e to the customer for example changes to the specifica tion it is legitimate to charge for the changes as they were not what the original estimate was based on If the slippage is due to internal factors these should be noted and built into any future estimates Strategic planning While it might be said that strategic planning is not at least directly a part of the writing process it is integral to the providing customers with what they need and indeed to the continued employment of technical writers We have all heard the saying anyone can write and too often this is taken to be true the documentation is produced by whoever happens to be free when it s needed When we think of strategic planning we tend to think of large companies planning for the future but it s not just E for large companies It is equally impor tant for everyone right down to sole proprietors Some stages apply to all organisations whatever their size 1 Know the marketplace Who is using technical writers and in which industries What are the others doing Outsourcing Using non writers Do they know technical writers exist What do customers want and are we supplying it What are our competitors doing 2 Identify trends what is going to affect technical writing over the next five years Factors may be Economic such as outsourc ing to cheaper workplaces and replacing hard copy with online info
73. ers to form a committee to decide which docu mentation issues you want feedback on which customers to visit and the goals of the customer visits Include at least one product manager a documentation manager a sales repre sentative and a couple of writers They can help you with identifying customers and areas of improvement 4 Creating your customer profile You want to find customers that can assist you in the areas where your docu mentation is lacking It might take some time to find such customers Work with your sales representatives and product managers they might need to talk to the customers to get the initial contact Customer Contact Letter TAPTI i a plored for be noe GP aur cond TH subject Customer Satisfaction with slompanys Docurventation Mr nameis First lt Last I am a sites at compar Cru documentation tearm at accompany is always working to improve cur documentation We obtained your nare from sores for emamnple conbererce sales representative product manazel reader coramnent forme Your Input is very important to us because you mentioned that we Tread to improve our documentation lt Mobe that this sentence is applicable omy if the satisfaction is low gt nr documentation usability tearm is interested in visiting your site and talking with you about your satisfaction with the Current set of sCompany documentation Car visit wld take at most two hours of your time Inappreciation we will
74. estern prepress associations no correction facilities Products such as Markzware FlightCheck offer support for design oriented applica tions such as QuarkXPress Photoshop and Illustrator but minimal support for Word and FrameMaker Customised applications such as MDocChecker created by Mekon Ltd allow bespoke checks to be made to Microsoft Office documents Postflighting Postflighting checks often offer a more practical solution than preflighting as the final format can be limited to PDF The single file format has meant that software vendors have been able to make products that can perform extensive checks irrespective of the original creator application However if serious issues are found there is less scope in the PDF file format to correct them Products such as Enfocus Pitstop provide a means of checking PDF files and a limited ability to make corrections Solution 1 single user test cycle One user creates one document that contains text graphics and images The user creates PDF files and then runs a postflight check using either Enfocus PitStop Professional This is a plug in product for Adobe Acrobat and checks are made from within Acrobat Markzware FlightCheck This is a standalone product for preflight and postflight testing of docu ments a The user responds to the postflight report and decides whether to Correct any errors on the source documents and re create the PDFs Use PitS
75. ey work in and documenta tion in particular Apart from using this expertise in your normal work what else can you do with it How about writing a book for one of the world s leading publishers of business and management titles You could team up with Gower Publishing We are always on the lookout for new ideas and new authors said Jonathan Norman Publisher Marketing is the biggest challenge facing publishers particularly since the number of books published on every subject has grown year on year Gower s solution to this problem is to find highly distinctive books within a variety of key areas including internal and corporate communication If you have an idea for a book on communication or something on a particular industry or process you can contact Jonathan by e mail at jnorman gowerpub com For more information visit www gowerpub com potent htm You can read several reviews of Gower books at www qualityauthors co uk Employment news Word from ISTC members shows growing optimism in the job market Individuals and documentation companies permanent staff and contractors all shared a cautious confi dence That said some members felt that many of the opportunities lay in the south east and that the future is not so good further north Others said they had decided to improve the quality of their lives by moving away from the south east and eT 2 had no problems finding work A disturbing develo
76. ferent meanings of usability Technical communicators must have a good understanding of what the term usability actually covers a A philosophy usability must be understood as matching the needs of a particular user for a particular use Barnum 2002 p6 A process this is sometimes known as participative design usability engineering or user centred design A result this produces usable products or usable documents it is sometimes a synonym for user friendly A set of techniques these include contextual enquiry or think aloud protocol This article focuses on process and techniques to support career develop ment Process key stages A product only becomes usable if careful attention is given to usability throughout the development cycle Planning Planning for usability means among other things developing user profiles blueprinting the product around user of responsibility and that they be effective communicators and listeners Olshvsky 2002 Designing for usability Key design issues must be addressed Users Involve around 8 10 users if you want to use statistics Otherwise you will get good enough results with 3 5 users by following Nielsen s discount usability engineering Also remember that one user is better than none Tests Nielsen s discount methods paper prototyping scenarios heuristic evaluation simple thinking aloud De Jong a
77. ff operating from three locations across the United Kingdom Software amp Database Development Technical Authorship amp Global Translation Interactive Electronic Technical Publications IETPs tms support solutions limited will meet customer requirements trilogi Development seamlessly through the company s four operating arms Training Needs Analysis TNA amp Course Development logistics publications training and placements Computer Based Training CBT Technical Illustration Multimedia Services 3D Modelling amp Animation Web Based Solutions I T Support Services For further information contact Tom Nicholas Tel 01476 560099 Email tnicholas tmsss com Staff Placements logistics publications training placements 22 Tollemache Road Spittlegate Level Ind Est Grantham Lincolnshire NG31 7UH Tel 44 0 1476 560099 Fax 44 0 1476 577391 16 Careers 6 Careers The relationship between ILS and technical communication Tom Nicholas and Velma Parker explain Integrated Logistics Support in simple terms and identify its relationship with technical communication This article has been written to support the case for admitting Integrated Logistics Support ILS engineers who practise technical communication as part of their role into the ISTC as full members Without ILS it would be true to say that within certain markets many ISTC members would have more Spare time on their hands than they would wish Th
78. fined objec tives or outputs The LSA tasks will Fault Tree Analysis FTA Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis FMECA Reliability Centred Maintenance RCM Analysis Failure and Defect Reporting And Corrective Action Systems FRACAS DRACAS These tasks and analytical techniques feed the LSAR with valuable data that will be used to determine the level of support required to achieve the optimum WLC for the equipment or product Figure 3 identifies typical LSAR outputs Is ILS necessary The short answer is yes The UK MoD and US DoD will not purchase any operational equipment for In Service use that has not been subjected to ILS analysis Major goals achieved include Increased reliability of equipment in operation a Safer operator and maintainer interaction with equipment hazard reduction a Ease of maintenance Greater availability of spares a Clear and accurate technical documentation Correct level of training Reduction in equipment down time Extended In Service life Reduced WLC Commercial industry is waking up to the advantages of ILS and applying many of the task analysis techniques highlighted in this article The ILS process can get complicated but if you take a look at the simplified version of events shown in Figure 4 you can see that it makes a lot of sense generate volumes of data that have to be managed as a single source to be available to
79. graph Nk Mon a NNIM NENO 22 paragr oe ee erect e em ey 43 QR eee 4 po wora ce eee Niko Paragraph 5 p 22 client name spelling gt Paragraph 4 p 27 do we have to say services are limited see what James ed Sophie Julian Mike Charlotte Chrissie think when they send comments oh and let me know P 52 data no source for stoa P E mmemecsemes 8 9 NEMA wm p 22 23 25 se Seine ee etapa om N 5 0 words 4 9 15 16 Product data previous model number paragraph 6 page 16 gt see mike re new mod and cat number Do we have to use verdana this is going external refer fr E ae uide k MKT style guide 200 dlsle iE Tired of red penand paper Ready for intelligent communication Mekon Notus is an easy to use online collaboration tool that speeds up document review and approval Enhancing the power of Adobe Acrobat Notus enables several reviewers to add comments to an online document saving time and increasing the organisation s productivity aa aS _ Mekon For more information on how notus will change the way you review and collaborate visit http www mekon com NotusWebDemo index html intelligent document solutions www mekon com All trademarks are the property of their respective owners E amp OE TE IMPRIMATUR Document Solutions authoring illustration publishing translation localisation training Imprimatur Limited T 01483 453500 F 01483 560643 www imprimatur co uk
80. hard Hodgkinson FISTC works in User Technologies at IBM UK He has been involved in the development of ISO IT standards since 1990 and represents the UK on three international committees Richard is currently the convenor of ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 7 WG 2 and is the editor of several ISO IT standards addressing software documentation icons and accessibility Email Richard_Hodgkinson uk ibm com Trooping the colours Color Harmony A guide to creative color combinations by Hideaki Chijiiwa Publisher Edition Olms AG Zurich ISBN 3 283 00390 4 158 pages paperback 14 99 Reviewed by Malcolm Beaumont MISTC A few years ago I wanted to use colour to make some screen documents more attractive but didn t know how to work with colour effectively My visit to the local university s library uncovered numerous books that just made things more complicated but it also introduced me to a book that provided solutions Color Harmony At the time it wasn t possible to order the book in the UK but that has changed and it is now available in the UK and Europe Professor Chijiiwa keeps theory to the minimum and he puts the emphasis on showing combinations of two three and four colours demonstrating and explaining the successful combina tions and also the unsuccessful ones He shows how colour harmony follows specific rules observing that it is part science and part art the science is knowing which colours to use the art is kno
81. hat worked well for my documents For most of them I needed to lighten the lighter colour slightly demonstrating that the book s samples are only starting points The author emphasises that varying the shades is more important than varying hues and suggests that varying both might give too much contrast My experiments confirmed this the bottom two combi nations in Figure 2 were certainly not as relaxing as the other four Colour schemes are important for many things for example adverts book covers products packaging clothing combinations interior and exterior decorations and plant arrangements Any scheme defines a mood so it s important to select colours that give 48 Book review Book review A D Figure 2 Two colour combinations d the intended mood The book contains examples of colour schemes suitable for the following moods striking tranquil exciting natural warm cold young feminine and surprising There are also some colour combinations from national features including Chinese porcelain Incan textiles African masks Greek pottery and British Wedgwood porcelain Getting started with using colour effectively can be daunting just think with 24 bit colour on a computer there are nearly 17 million colours to choose from It s hardly surprising that the professor says there is a fine margin between colour harmony and colour chaos We definitely need some help and this bo
82. heir design However the difficulty in producing instructions that can work for a range of users with differing aptitudes is also apparent How cognitive psychology informs instruction design From the details above it is clear that instructions and diagrams should assist people in creating a mental model and therefore reduce the demand on mental resources The design princi ples presented below are based on this premise The bulk of research produced in this area has been published very recently and comes from a small group of researchers The following design principles are adapted or taken from Agrawala et al 2003 and are combined with research by Heiser and Tversky 2003 Although originally specific to assembly diagrams these principles can be applied to instructions for other tasks Grouping of parts Assemblies are broken into a hierarchy of parts separated by clusters of components that stand out visually or are grouped by functions for example the back of a chair It is proposed that instructions should deal with parts within a group either in sequence or at the same time Step by step instructions Procedures should be presented in a series of diagrams with a clear and explicit order However having too many steps should be avoided by detailing repetitive actions once only Significant parts When an assembly or task contains a number of significant procedures a step in the instructions should be devoted to
83. herefore features of the overall assembly object must be visible Some of these guidelines can conflict for example the orientation might have to be changed to improve visibility of a new component This leads to another guideline Ensure a Stable orientation and perspective Heiser amp Tversky 2003 Constant changes in orientation to improve visibility may be counter productive In addition two further guidelines can be identified Ensure information required for a procedure is explicit and does not have to be inferred as inferring adds to the difficulty Novick and Morse 2000 Do not present too many elements of information at once Kalyuga et al 1998 Based on the author s research this can be clarified do not present too many unique elements of information at once Richardson et al In Press These design principles are the results of recent research and can be evaluated and improved Professionals working in the area may already know some of them from direct experience However the principles do demonstrate how cognitive experiments can inform design by revealing how people think about a task Finally the design principles from Agrawala et al 2003 have been used to write software to automate the design of instructions this is also detailed in the paper by Agrawala et al Their system uses an algorithm based on cognitive design principles and thus the effectiveness of the instruc
84. hich competitors are doing well and what are they providing that we don t All of this takes time and we must be prepared to spend the time doing it If we do it well it could give us an impor tant competitive edge and even keep us working when times get tough If we know where the market and clients or potential clients are going we can prepare ourselves to go with them So where might this lead us Perhaps to FA FH Fali rW y ww Learn new skills programming skills seem useful at the moment Enter a niche market with little competition Try other types of writing such as marketing science or journalism Branch out into related areas such as testing or web design I could go on but the options will be different for every company and individual One thing is sure in an ever changing workplace these are issues that we all need to consider The next stage In the next article we ll look at the writing stage of the process This will cover how the information gathered is presented to the user ie References Hackos J T 1994 Managing Your Documentation Projects Wiley Society for Technical Communication 1997 Technical Communication Volume 44 Number 4 strategic planning special issue STC Publications Van Laan K and Julian C 2001 The Complete Idiot s Guide to Technical Writing Alpha Books is a technical writer with more than 20 years experience spanning both hardware and softw
85. his can go one of two ways 1 Fantasy land You know the amount of time needed you know the resources available you allocate the resources accordingly you say when the a where Size estimated page count Scope complexity 2 5 Quality what is acceptable 2 25 3 U Time Size x Scope x Guality fairly straightforward familiar product developers available 1 5 more complicated product learning curve one review cycle 2 complicated product no specifications more than one review cycle new product changes ongoing multiple reviews needed information must be complete as 2 plus more than bare minimum proofed style guide as 2 5 plus indexed edited additional information added 3 5 as 3 plus illustrations and graphics structured task based 4 as3 5 plus layout designed for maximum usability and tested Figure 1 Formula for calculating time required to create a document documentation will be ready and everyone Says Fine I ve never actually seen this happen but maybe I ve just been unlucky 2 Real life You know the amount of time you know your resources and you know when the documentation is needed You then work out what you can deliver by the deadline given the resources you have and then compromise where you can You can compromise by Pushing for additional resources to get everything done by the deadline Prioritising the documentation and offering
86. his type of conver sion at the PDF stage Problem 2 making paper proofs If a small scale ink jet printer is used as a local proofing device this may suggest a closer match to the monitor image than seen in the final printed document This is because such printers are not PostScript devices and tend to expect RGB colours they make the conversion to CMYK on output Solution Use a PostScript software Raster Image Processor RIP for the inkjet printer PowerRIP 2000 Pro is a print driver and software RIP that intercepts print code and sends colour managed CMYK to the printer It offers an excellent low cost solution to accurate local proofing Try to ensure that you use a proofing paper that is similar to the final printing material Press ready documents This section looks beyond the handling of image files As most image use involves a combination of graphics and text it is more practical to consider how to handle final files for print Problem One of the biggest headaches of working with print is the last minute problems that are uncovered by pre press departments To content creators who are not familiar with the print process these can be difficult to solve and sometimes impossible to explain or avoid in the future The usual solution to this is preflighting or postflighting These processes involve using software appli cations to interrogate print files for potential problems Preflighting is a term reserved f
87. ic ipate in discussions about an online version of a document under review Their job is quick and easy using fully featured navigation multiple discus sion views and search functionality A single mouse click sends a reviewer s comments back to the author WebWorks FinalDraft is a new and exciting solution that finally addresses one of the biggest challenges in content development getting documents thoroughly reviewed in a timely and cost effective manner It streamlines the entire edit and review process helping organisations to improve the quality of their content and accelerate the docu ment production cycle said Michael E Fabry CEO of Quadralay Corporation FinalDraft costs US 399 plus ship ping from www webworks com or in the UK from www mekon com For more information e mail info mekon com European Information Development Conference One of the most important meeting points for the technical communication industry in Europe takes place on 10 11 November in Wiesbaden Germany As with the inaugural event last year it is linked to the Tekom conference which takes place on 11 12 November The conference theme this year is New challenges and new solutions in an evolving professional environment Other subjects being discussed include online Help localisation XML usability and content management Our aim is to create a high quality event for specialists who are responsible for the developme
88. ic reasoning is based on the work of Larkin and Simon 1987 Recently a few researchers in this area have begun to consider the role of diagrams in instructions such as those used to explain mechanical systems or assembly tasks This article deals with the more recent work which considers the role of diagrammatic instructions Before detailing how this research can inform the design of instructions and diagrams it is worth introducing some termi nology and explaining what happens when people use diagrammatic instruc tions during three dimensional or Spatial tasks such as assembly How people use diagrams During the initial phases of a three dimensional task the instructions or diagrams must be comprehended Cognitive psychologists agree that this requires people to indulge in mental imagery or in the construction of three dimensional mental models Hegarty amp Just 1993 The construction of a mental representation requires time and mental effort and it is affected by the difficulty of the problem and the design of the instructions Poor materials that require information to be inferred add to the difficulty Novick and Morse 2000 These mental models are held in Working Memory this is the short term memory used for things like remem bering directions or phone numbers for a short period Working Memory has a limited duration and capacity which differs between individuals It is a critical factor in instructio
89. ientific and technical communication How about investigating which organisations already have scientific and technical communicators as members people who might benefit from our associations working together Examples include For science ICSTI International Council for Scientific and Technical Information For engineering the Engineering Council ITE Institution of Incorporated Engineers IEE Institution of Electrical Engineers and others For information technology BCS British Computer Society For publishing ALPSP Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers I m sure that there are plenty I ve missed just as I m sure that these organisations all have scientific and technical communicators among their members I will be surprised if we don t find that there are ISTC members who are or could be members of these organisations too Anyway there are some ideas for the future and I can assure you that Council will give them all thorough consideration before deciding whether to progress them However that s only a start I d welcome your views on these suggestions not to mention your own ideas too After all the ISTC is here to serve you why not tell us what you d like to see Conference 2004 Finally ld like to remind you about Conference on 8 10 October We will be offering an indexing workshop run by the Society of Indexers on the Saturday morning Although
90. imprimatur co uk Componentone DoctoHelp 7 Better The World s First Help Authoring Tool Now the First to Deliver Annual Subscription Easier Faster empowers Help authors technical writers and software developers to easily create HTML Help cross platform HTML based Help JavaHelp WinHelp Microsoft Help 2 0 and printed documentation from a single set of easily maintained Word documents With Doc To Help 7 and Doc To Help 7 Professional ComponentOne offers a solution for every level of Help authoring From basic online Help or printed documentation to the most robust and professional Help systems you ll have the tool for any job Now you can truly embrace your Help authoring tool NN PRO HLA Natural Search Easily add Natural Language search capabilities Modular TOC Utility Automatically populates all modular system Help files with fully functional table of contents links Image Map Editor Quickly edit inserted images and add hotspot links to specific topics in the Help file Theme Designer Take full control over built in themes and easily customize them to fit your desired look and feel Context String Editor Define context ID strings for Microsoft Help 2 0 and conveniently connect them to Help topics Doc To Help 7 Professional includes a new subscription service that delivers one full year of exclusive service and value unmatched by any other Help
91. ing of customers requirements Technical writers and usability work 14 FLORENCE DUJARDIN Arguing that technical communicators can contribute to usability work Relationship between ILS and technical communication 16 TOM NICHOLAS and VELMA PARKER Exploring technical communication within Integrated Logistics Support The death of the technical author 19 ELLIS PRATT Considering whether the traditional role of technical author will disappear Creating web based courses 22 RONBLICQ Designing online programmes that do not depend on tutor support Preparing winning images for websites 26 PHILIP RANDALL Spicing up your website without slowing it down Choosing the right tools 3O JOHN ROGERS Discussing an analytical approach to your tool selection process Process mapping part 2 of 3 32 CHRIS PEARSON Running an effective process mapping session The writing process planning part 2 of 4 35 DAMIEN BRANIFF Exploring the elements that make up the process of technical writing Cognition and diagrams part 2 of 2 38 MILES RICHARDSON Discussing the influence of current research in cognitive psychology Cover Racing at the Week End du Prix de Arc de Triomphe 20038 For details of this year s meeting visit www france galop com hippos H75116 htm Communicator the quarterly journal of the ISTC Editor Marian Newell journal editor istc org uk or 01344 626895 News editor Mick Davidson newsdesk istc org uk Copyeditors Tony Eyre Nic
92. ion and the training of technical communica tors Hanna has received six research awards She is also a freelance trans lator and has carried out research and written publications on the cognitive foundations of intercultural commu nication translation knowledge management and usability and on the role of information technology in trans lation and terminology management Her other interests include playing the violin cycling trekking canoeing skating and skiing though presumably not all at the same time For more information visit www tceurope org index htm and www ida his se ida staff hanna_risku_ eng html At the request of a member in the Middle East there is now a new ISTC discussion group Called ISTC_Middle_East the group is primarily intended for ISTC members working in or from the Middle East However as the number of members in the Middle East is limited it could also include those in the Far East as well For more information visit http groups yahoo com group istc_middle_east or e mail istc_middle_ east subscribe yahoogroups com with subscribe as the subject Top of the popcomms Organised by popcomm training the Communication Bonanza is a new and instructional awards evening to be held in London on 22 September 2004 At the event you ll be able to enjoy a convivial evening buffet dinner and even have a say in the final judging The awards are open to all organisations pr
93. ipant s response If Trevor selects the correct answer the screen reinforces the learning and then takes him directly to Screen 9 the new unit of information However if Trevor selects Answer B he is given further information and taken to Step 8 Step 8 provides two screens one containing another test question and the other giving further information to reinforce the learning It then takes Trevor to Step 9 This multiple route process demanded considerable initial programme development For each unit of information and the consequent tests and responses I had to create a detailed intricate storyboard showing the numerous screens needed to accom modate different participants needs In the unit shown here there are 22 screens participants work through as few as five and as many as 13 depending on how rapidly they learn and how accurately they respond to the questions I should add that the Wrong Answer screens tell participants they are wrong very gently they never say You are wrong They provide a response that first supports the chosen answer and then brings in additional factors that should be considered Here is an example You were correct to identify that what happened should be stated in the opening sentence However readers also want to know what the result or effect was and that information also should be up front to satisfy their curiosity Measuring performance In any course in which p
94. iversity of Chicago Press Hart s Rules 39 edn 1983 Oxford University Press Oxford English A Guide to the Language 1992 Oxford University Press Webster s Dictionary 1999 Landoll After 23 years as a contract software technical author and editor Nick Robson FISTC is Customer Information Manager for De La Rue Identity Systems in Basingstoke Hampshire E mail Nick Robson uk delarue com International English For those who have not yet downloaded Guidelines for Writing English Language Technical Documentation for an International Audience from www intecom org here is a flavour of the project s findings ize endings to words like organize are acceptable everywhere although increasingly ise is preferred in UK English Although there is generally a UK US divide on pairs like our or and re er there are exceptions For example both glamour and theatre are seen in the US Vowel pairs for a single syllable are less common in US English for example the UK manoeuvre translates into the US maneuver Even in UK English the use of ligatures and ce to represent such sounds is fading Consonants are doubled less often in US English for example the UK modelled translates into the US modeled Rarer differences include bureaux UK and bureaus US and mollusc UK and mollusk US Other English variants are influenced by history and geography Places like Australi
95. k Robson and Mike Unwalla Proofreaders Gordon Ingram Tim Joynson and Linda Robins Layout Mekon Ltd www mekon com Advertising Felicity Davie felicity tou can co uk or 01344 466600 Subscriptions Carol Hewitt istc istc org uk or 01733 390141 Back issues www isic org uk pages members commun php ISTC members only The Editor welcomes articles and letters for publication Opinions expressed in Communicator by contributors are not necessarily those of the ISTC All articles are copyright and are the property of the authors who have asserted their moral rights For permission to reproduce an article contact the author directly or through the Editor Advertisements in Communicator are accepted on the understanding that they conform to the British Code of Advertising Practice Acceptance of an advertisement for publication does not imply that a product or service has the ISTC s endorsement Regulars 4 Editorial 5 Letters 6 President s notebook 7 ISTC news 40 Industry news 42 Publishing 46 Hints for writers 47 International standards 48 Book review 49 Translation 50 Member profile Summer 2004 ISSN 0308 6925 www istc org uk pages journals php Publishing deadlines Communicator is published four times a year Spring Copy by 31 January Published 21 March Summer Copy by 30 April Published 21 June Autumn Copy by 31 July Published 21 September Winter Copy by 31 October Published 21 December Polish up
96. l models of machines from text and diagrams Journal Of Memory And Language 32 6 pp 717 742 Heiser J and Tversky B 2002 Descriptions and Depictions in Acquiring Complex Systems In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Heiser J and Tversky B 2003 Cognitive Design Principles for Visualizations Revealing and Instantiating In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cogntive Science Society Kalyuga S Chandler P and Sweller J 1998 Levels of expertise and instructional design Human Factors 40 1 1 17 Larkin J H and Simon H A 1987 Why a diagram is Sometimes worth ten thousand words Cognitive Science 11 65 69 Marcus N Cooper M and Sweller J 1996 Understanding instructions Journal of Educational Psychology 88 1 49 63 Novick L R and Morse D L 2000 Folding a fish making a mushroom The role of diagrams in executing assembly procedures Memory amp Cognition 28 7 1242 1256 Richardson M Jones G and Torrance M In Press Identifying the task variables that influence perceived object assembly complexity Ergonomics Zacks J M and Tversky B 2003 Structuring Information Interfaces For Procedural Learning Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied 9 88 100 is a Lecturer at the University of Derby with a background in ergonomics He is nearing completion of his PhD which investigates the
97. ld meet our unique needs and we elected to follow their advice so that we would not be limited when we came to develop future courses Programme design We realised that a single course embracing all the topics we needed to include would be uncomfortably large It would contain over 1100 screens of information which would result in lengthy download times for partici pants Consequently we chose to create eight courses each of approximately equal length Foundation courses The first three courses are core units that every participant entering the programme has to complete before going on to the more advanced courses Get to the Point introduces course participants to a technique that will help them to develop a cogent opening Statement that will focus their readers attention on the primary information they have to convey Organise the Details shows how to develop the remainder of the message so that it effectively supports the Opening statement Effective E mail Techniques teaches how to write short but properly devel oped e mail messages and how to be an efficient e mail communicator We chose to insert e mail as a core course because in business today it has become the most frequently used and the most often misused method of communication Advanced courses There are five advanced courses Sharpen Your Language Skills covers techniques for using the active voice removing ineffective words main
98. le usabil ity is traditionally though mistakenly viewed as a conclusive phase of product or document development Yet both rely on understanding users behaviours and similar skill sets The objective of a user task analysis is to understand deeply how users perform their tasks Hackos and Redish 1998 p7 Managers clients and sometimes technical communicators themselves may object users are all different the product is so original no one has any idea of how to use it it costs too much There are also clear benefits the time you spend up front understanding users and the domain will save time during the design and development process by reducing guesswork re work and exploration down blind alleys Calde 2003 To obtain these benefits it is necessary have a good understanding and experience of information gathering techniques interviews focus groups user surveys contextual inquiry user observation system evaluation use cases and scenario based evaluation to name but a few Both the information gathered and the techniques used make it possible for technical communicators to a Offer knowledge of the corporate context to generate test scenarios a Suggest what product features to test and how they should be tested Gather information using techniques used for user task analysis Provide document design expertise for example to design questionnaires and reports Dif
99. lu encing its design for supportability and determining the support requirements To implement the ILS process one must first recognise and understand the stages of logistic support for the life of the equipment or product The life cycle is referred to as CADMID Figure 1 Concept Assessment Demonstration Manufacture In Service and Disposal There is a series of ILS planning documents that must be produced and maintained through various stages of CONCEPT Figure 1 CADMID cycle the CADMID cycle including a Integrated Support Plan ISP a Logistic Support Analysis Plan a Training Plan a Technical Documentation Plan Packaging Handling Storage and Transportation PHS amp T Plan a In Service Support Plan a Supply Support Plan a Support and Test Equipment Plan Logistic Demonstration Plan a Facilities Plan a Software Support Plan Maintainability Plan a Disposal Plan These planning documents will provide details of procedures and provisions necessary to meet the overall ILS requirement You will note the refer ences to a Training Plan and a Technical Documentation Plan What are the main elements of ILS As you would expect there are detailed specifications in place that define these elements and the processes to be employed The ILS Defence Standard Def Stan 00 60 lists the following elements a Logistic Support Analysis LSA Maintenance Planning a Supply
100. lverQueen66898 aol com 10 STC news ccc ISTC The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators is the UK s leading body for people engaged in technical communication It provides a forum for members to exchange views and represents the profession in dealings with other professional bodies and with the government The ISTC was formed in 1972 from the Presentation of Technical Information Group est 1948 the Technical Publications Association est 1953 later the Institution of Technical Authors and Illustrators and the Institute of Technical Publicity and Publications est 1963 To join the ISTC or upgrade your membership contact Carol Hewitt on 01733 390141 or at istc istc org uk or PO Box 522 Peterborough PE2 5WX Council members President Gavin Ireland president istc org uk Treasurer Peter Fountain treasurer istc org uk Website lain Wright web istc org uk Journal Marian Newell journal editor istc org uk Julian Murfitt julian murfitt mekon com Newsletter David Cooper newsletter editor istc org uk Noel Reid noelreid yahoo com Education John Young johnyoung parkfarm fsworld uk Membership lan Wood ian datim freeuk com Trevor Tuddenham 01707 331066 Marketing John Nicholson john nicholson rollsroyce com Documentation awards Les Best lpbest clara net International Alan Fisk afisk Counterp com Other members Eddie Harrod edharrod hotmail com John Tooze 020 8665 6595 Com
101. mail placements tmsss com For further information contact Tom Nicholas 01476 560099 Candidates must have general ILS LSA experience emallinicholas wimsss om logistics publications training placements 22 Tollemache Road Spittlegate Level Ind Est Grantham Lincolnshire NG31 7UH Tel 44 0 1476 560099 Fax 44 0 1476 577391 Careers The death of the technical author Ellis Pratt considers whether the role of technical author might disappear in the future Technical authors do not have high prominence in the workplace and they do not have the best of images as can be seen by the movie The Technical Writer Today a number of technical authors are struggling to find new employment in the current IT sector and one can find messages on Internet newsgroups guestioning the future employment prospects for technical authors in North America and Furope Some wonder whether the role of the technical author will disappear as other careers have in the past In this article we look at the problems faced by technical authors in defining their role and make some recommendations for the future The problems Let s first look at a number of issues that technical authors face Overlapping technologies means overlapping job roles Technologies and software are developing in a way that means the boundaries between the programmer the technical author the Web developer and the trainer are becoming blurred For exampl
102. n also ensures that participants who feel strongly one way or another will consider it properly dealt with not swept under the carpet At the close of the discovery session you should have a detailed representa tion of the process on a length of brown paper a collection of documents and perhaps notes and issues that have thus far not been included in the map Mapping As with any voyage of discovery the discoveries are made out in the field notes are made and samples and arte facts are collected along the way After the voyage comes consolidation when the maps are drawn and the books written Process mapping follows much the same path When the discovery session ends and the participants go back to their process tasks the process mapper must take down the brown paper roll it up and take it back to create a series of manageable process maps A process will usually divide into quite logical segments each of which contains a number of process elements that may be sensibly aggre gated In the last article in this series we will look at ways to create different types of map Ideally the discovery session will use the same symbology as will be used on the prepared process maps The seven element symbols can be used in full process maps and cross functional maps However relationship maps use a reduced symbol set of blocks boxes to represent process participants and arrowed lines to show their inputs an
103. n design if the instructions or diagram present too many elements of information at once this can overwhelm Working Memory and decrease performance and the effectiveness of instructions Marcus et al 1996 Kalyuga et al 1998 The individual differences identi fied in Working Memory also occur across many other human aptitudes and abilities These differences influ ence the effectiveness of instructions For instance diagrams in assembly instructions are particularly effective for people with low spatial ability the ability to mentally rotate objects or read maps However research into diagrams of complex systems for example a car brake system shows that people with low mechanical ability are not aided by diagrams when required to make inferences beyond what is explicitly communicated in the diagram Heiser amp Tversky 2002 A further issue is that we know people think about objects in terms of the parts that are functionally signifi cant and perceptually salient Heiser amp Tversky 2003 Research has shown that assembly performance is improved if the assembly structure depicted in the instructions matches the structure expected by the user particularly when the order of assembly can vary Zacks amp Tversky 2003 The problem is that it is difficult to measure what structure the user expects and this differs between individuals Understanding how people use diagrams and instructions can help us to improve t
104. nce to include parts of our programme as a new component among their course 25 offerings The difficulty is that the software they use for their courses cannot accommodate our unique learning approach that is it cannot measure performance and stream participants through appropriate screens In some cases we have had to modify the courses to work with their software which unfortunately reduces the effectiveness of the learning experience in others we have been unable to satisfy their needs 3 For some organisations that have bought a quantity of courses for their staff we have had to adapt the control software to co habit with their control software In other cases company firewalls have inhibited some employees from accessing our courses At first the problem was thought to be at our end and fairly lengthy communications ensued before the source of the problem was identified and rectified 4 Although we provide opportunities for users to send in assignments for instructor evaluation and translation localisation typesetting publishing internet solutions expected this to be a popular choice to date April 2004 few users have done so Are we happy with the programme Yes it effectively achieves what we set out to do However we are still experiencing reluctance on the part of business and technical professionals to enrol This is partly because many people are concerned that e learning will be a dull S
105. nd Schellens plus and minus method identifying positive and negative features Formal usability testing methods usually lab based Usability principles Identifying principles may be more difficult as it seems as different gurus propound different sets of principles I have chosen here a set of principles Quesenbury 2003 which form a consistent clear and concise system based on the ISO standard Figure 1 Quesenbury s mapping is flexible and allows for varying requirements For instance a website for a museum exhibition should be engaging to attract people to the exhibition and very easy to learn since the audience v v v centred activities identifying clear usability requirements a standards and criteria while balancing constraints costs and benefits There are opportunities for technical communicators technically requirements definers can be executives product managers marketing people designers or whoever Their place within the organi sation doesn t matter what does is that they be trusted to fairly represent the needs of the constituent sides of the organisation that they be given an appropriate level easy to learn Figure 1 Quesenbury s principles effective efficient error engagin tolerant gaging am is the general public In contrast the major considerations for a website supporting online ordering could be efficiency a
106. nd error tolerance Testing and measuring Design principles should be used to assess the final product and decide what to measure In the example of the online ordering facility a measure of effectiveness could be users must register without error the usability A word of caution if testing takes place late in the lifecycle then few changes may be permitted before the product releases Barnum 2002 p271 To conclude Technical communicators have a good case to be involved in usability work based on their user task analysis work To extend their role technical commu nicators need to address a gap in skills and knowledge in the areas of goal could be fewer than 5 of regis Research practices such as heuristic trations reguire follow up This will also help you decide how to measure effectiveness time taken to complete registration or number of keystrokes Obviously this reguires a working pro totype of the website Analysing and reporting Effective usability reporting involves Capturing and categorising problems evaluation prototyping think aloud use scenarios etc Relevant theory learning theory cognitive psychology Statistics depending on the formality of the usability testing E References Barnum C M 2002 Usability Testing and Research Allyn and Bacon predetermined labels or affinity matching for example concept and navigation problems Recommending solutions
107. ng an obviously good thing providing docu mentation in the reader s language is in some circumstances a legal require ment Clearly organisations selling their products in the EU and beyond must plan for localisation and translation at the start of a project To help organisations market their products and services internationally TCeurope the umbrella organisation for European technical communica tion organisations has produced Usable and safe operating manuals for consumer goods A Guideline The Guideline helps producers avoid many of the legal and other pitfalls associated with documentation I was one of several ISTC members involved in developing it and although it is oriented towards consumer goods communicators in other fields should find much of interest The Guideline is currently available in 11 languages ISTC members can download a PDF file of the English version from the members area of the ISTC website I hope you will all take the opportunity to use the guidelines and send in your comments so that TCeurope can produce an enhanced version in a year or two ie Note Dave Cooper was the subject of the Member profile in the Spring 2004 Communicator We welcome letters of up to 200 words but reserve the right to edit to fit soace available Write to journal editor istc org uk or PO Box 522 Peterborough PE2 5WxX If R more than just excellent translation PROFESSIONAL PROJECT MANAGERS
108. nship maps Having speci fied the scope of the discovery session ee 2 in advance on the day you should always strive to cover the breadth of the process It is easier to follow up for more detail than it is to identify a missing process step Some process mapping tutorials suggest using PostIt notes attendees write process detail onto PostIts and place them onto the process map A key feature of PostIt products is of course that they are removable In practice PostIt notes tend to remove themselves from the brown paper in a haphazard way attempting to take down and store a process map that has PostIts attached is an impos sible task Anyone who does this is destined to spending a lonely session attempting to recreate the process map from a sheet of paper and a pile of no longer sticky PostIts The facilitator should take instruc tions from attendees and write up the process Figure 2 Seeing specific documents often acts as a trigger for more detail including documents at the discovery stage provides evidence and familiar touchstones for the partici pants When documents are provided they should be included in the brown paper by the facilitator The facilitator should catalogue each document a simple serial number will suffice before attaching it to the map using spray mount or sticky tape When documents are bulky more than two or three pages stick the cover or a copy of the cover onto the map and store th
109. nt of multilingual product information especially tech nical writers editors web designers online Help designers usability special ists information managers translators and localisation experts said Tekom s Managing Director Michael Fritz The EIDC is an excellent opportunity for networking presenting your solution to a specialised audience and exchanging knowledge with experts from all parts of Europe For more information visit www tekom webforum de or www tceurope org Talking our language SDLX 2004 provides a complete and secure translation environment for those wanting to boost the quality and productivity of their translation activi ties SDLX is a computer aided transla tion CAT tool with an easy to learn interface and scalable performance It is compatible with other systems based on modern technology and open stand ards such as TMX TMX or Translation Memory eXchange is the vendor neutral open standard for storing and exchanging translation memories created by CAT systems sanctioned by the Localization Industry Standards Association www lisa org tmx SDLX dramatically improves productivity 40 Industry news Industry news of the total translation process from project creation to translation and quality assurance For more information visit www sdlx com re GOWER Are you experienced Many ISTC members spend years accumulating information about the business th
110. o risk of misleading a user and or antagonising companies that wish to protect their trademarks from falling into general use If docu ments are to stay within the company this safeguard is not needed When writing the term for the first time use the trademark symbol CTRL ALT T in Word but omit it afterwards to avoid reduced legibility Expressing degrees Centigrade Pressing Alt 0176 in Word will give the degree sign and in Windows most fonts have the ASCII character 248 as the degree symbol To obtain this ensure NumLock is on press the Alt key and enter 248 on the numeric keypad Release the Alt key For more informa tion on derived units visit http www 1 bipm org en si derived_ units 2 2 2 html When to use data and datum There was much discussion about which term was appropriate in which circum stance It was indicated that data is a collection of values usually related and is also treated as singular according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary The term a datum suggested to one author a discretely packaged object possibly a point of reference from which measure ments might be taken or comparisons made The term datum is rarely used now in computing circles and the Microsoft Manual of Style says not to use it The terms data and informa tion are not synonymous Data has no intrinsic meaning whereas information does Another can of worms Debate arose abo
111. oducing corporate communications of any sort and the closing date for submissions is 6 August For details and entry forms visit www popcomm co uk Hot potato Congratulations go to William Waddilove who recently won the title Spud Brain of Britain 2004 William battled through to the final where as he puts it I won the tie breaker for being less wrong than the other person The prize was a magnificent cup a food hamper vouchers and an invita tion to visit quite a few potatoes on the Waitrose Farm near Cambridge I hope that William will now receive the appropriate deference from other ISTC members Written by Mick Davidson If you have a story for the news pages contact us at newsdesk istc org uk Affiliate news Ellis Pratt Sales and Marketing Director of Cherryleaf talks about the future of the technical documentation business and what we will need to Know to survive How do you see the business of technical documentation in the future It s clear that more software development will be off shored that is carried out in lower cost countries If a project were to move to another native English speaking country it would be likely that the authoring work would go there as well However if the work were to be done in emerging countries such as India or China where English isn t the mother tongue then believe there is a good chance that the writing part would stay in the UK Fr
112. of University Challenge and it occurred to me that this might be a way of promoting our profession among the general public This drew a lot of interest and it looks like she has her team We ll await an announcement of the team s first appearance on University Challenge Developers to authors ratio Jane Dards asked Does anyone have any ball park figures for the ratio between developer days and author days Tm feeling a bit outnumbered at the moment This prompted numerous replies It is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string but David Farby wrote that Microsoft had a theoretical standard that for every six developers there should be three testers and one author This is an ideal probably rarely achieved but all we overworked and underpaid authors can sympathise with Jane Touch screen A posting from Stuart Miller brought one of the largest responses He wrote Tm writing a user manual for a piece of equipment controlled by a touch screen interface only no keyboard or mouse The user has to select a box on the screen and enter data using an on screen keyboard Does the user click tap or press the screen The variety of answers was over whelming but the overall favourite was touch the screen IH Michael Plant MISTC E mail mplant trenethick com 12 Conference 2 Conference Getting the most from customer visits Francisco Abedrabbo and Lypp tek Khoo Ellis offer some tips on
113. of each segment When they reach the Pause Point users would be told the length in time of the next segment and asked whether they want to take a break or continue a Having the programme automatically return users to the same point in the course when they return after taking a break or shutting down Creating an easy to follow navigation method with readily recognised icons a At the end of each course summarising the key points onto a closing screen that users can print out as a one page reference sheet Teaching methodology I wanted to devise a teaching method that would take course participants through a series of screens containing information and instruction and then intersperse them with questions to test ongoing learning I also wanted partici pants who have understood a concept quickly and have demonstrated they know how to apply it to work through fewer screens than participants who learnt the concept more slowly To achieve this I developed the streamed learning process shown in Figure 1 and described below Assume there are three course partici pants Roger R Sam S and Trevor T who enter a particular segment of the overall learning sequence at the same time and the sequence has between 18 and 22 screens Roger progresses through only five screens whereas Sam works through nine and Trevor works through either 11 or 13 screens depending on his under standing of the concept
114. of my work is for a fixed price so there s no issue about hours worked which you may have if you are a freelance who works through an agency That means clients are generally quite happy for me to work away from their site I think another big change is the move from paper to online materials What do you see as the biggest Changes in the next five years There s growing pressure to get products to market in ever shorter timescales That will affect the kind of documentation that can be produced and it may also have a detrimental effect on its quality On the other hand the documentation that is produced might be qualitatively better It s the old 80 20 rule we focus on the small bit that most people use and do it well and leave the rest undocumented for the help desk to pick up What do you like most It s like playing with Lego all day and then getting paid Great What do you like least People perceive us as nerds I think that s a harsh judgement We must combat this by being business aware learning how to demonstrate the value of our work in terms of cost savings and enhanced customer satisfaction How do you find operating as a small business in Britain I think there is too much confused and conflicting regulation and the Government could be more supportive and consistent For example Gordon Brown suggested two years ago that sole traders should incorporate to reduce their tax bill but now h
115. oject manager with responsibility for this activity and usually all the writer has to do is provide time estimates meet the dead lines and follow the standard templates If you work for a small company perhaps as the sole writer then you will probably be more intimately involved in the planning process Planning no matter how informal it may be is crucial to the success of any project Hackos 1994 says that good planning and management is needed to keep projects under control and profit able Project management is a huge subject with books written on every aspect of it but here we consider only two 1 Scope what the project will cover 2 Schedule when the project will be delivered Scope The scope basically defines how big and complex the project is and exactly what it covers This is to a large extent deter mined by the research done in the first stage of the writing process and also by what the customer wants As part of the research phase you carried out a task and user analysis so you should know roughly what type and level of documentation is needed For example there might be an Installation Manual System Administration Manual Quick Reference Guide and User Guide If you re anything like me you will also have started mentally at least to sort the information you have gathered into the various documents needed You may even have gone so far as to create outline manuals with chapter he
116. ok provides it Confident and inspired I m now going to dig out my paintbrushes and attack my bathroom El Hideaki Chijiiwa is head professor of psychology at the Musashino University of Fine Arts Tokyo Japan A few years ago he conducted a research project that investigated how colours are perceived by university students in 20 different countries across five continents Translation A blunt tool for sharp craftsmen Graham Cross ISTC Member and freelance technical translator reflects that words are seldom enough even in translation Words said the English philosopher and scientist before his time Francis Bacon over 300 years ago are the first distemper of learning Here is an early recognition of the fact that although language is the prime means for communicating and transferring knowledge it frequently fails to do so The main reason is that language is by nature suggestive rather than explicit less a technical drawing or blueprint and much more an impres sionist painting Words evoke rather than define In those documents where language has to be used in a precise way for example within patents contracts or legal acts the first thing we find is a careful definition of what specific words mean The same applies within a specialist field the first thing a student in any discipline has to learn is its specialist vocabulary or its specialist use of ordinary vocabulary Use of words
117. om a technical perspective the most likely and significant change will be towards unified content solutions where sentences paragraphs and other content are re used across documents It s something that might be taken up by a whole organisation As for online Help this will obviously be affected when Microsofts new Help standard Longhorn Help arrives What will a business like yours be doing in two years time We will be connectors linking prospects to experts We will also be seen as mavens information conduits for single sourcing reusable content solutions unified content solutions online Help and other important topics If people want to know anything they will come to us We also aim to be champions of and experts in written corporate documents As only 60 of online Help files are written by professional writers there s an opportunity to increase the amount of work carried out by technical authors I ve been collecting examples of what call diabolical documentation to use in talks about the common mistakes that non professional writers make What will the average technical author have to know to survive Well it s not necessarily what you know but whom you know The most successful writers meet are not the most knowledgeable but the most connected 42 Publishing Publishing Solving your image problems Lewis Marshall concludes his series on using images in print with a look a
118. on The overlapping of technologies and the uncertainty of the contribution of the technical author means that the boundaries between this and other positions in the organisation are becoming blurred However technical authors have skills that organisations still need Indeed they can be applied to new areas Cherryleaf applies its skills to other business areas and others can do the same This means taking a new perspective on the role So maybe we need to say The technical author is dead Long live the information designer EC is Sales and Marketing Director for Cherryleaf an ISTC Business Affiliate He has ten years experience working on documentation projects Cherryleaf helps organisations increase their performance with user information that is easy to access understand and use E mail ellis cherryleaf com 7 Training makes good sense You can improve your documentation by giving your own staff better training to add technical writing skills to their existing product knowledge There is only one college which has been independently assessed to the international standard ISO 9001 and their distance learning courses mean that your staff do not have to take time off work The syllabus is good for all industries echnical Authorship n Communicator in your reply or ZE Pru Expanding your horizons F E Oxford Belfry Milton Common hi Oxfordshire 0X9 10 early bird
119. ons limited tms placements limited offer the provision of specialist technical staff that is complimentary to the business requirements of the overall organisation and customer demands Staff is in demand for both permanent and contract positions Immediate vacancies include Training Manager SATCOM Requirement Training specialist to manage the analysis and development of training courses materials required in support of major communications programmes Work will be undertaken in the Hampshire area Knowledge experience of communication systems is essential ILS LSA Engineers Requirement Engineer to work in the Yorkshire Durham area Engineer to work in the Bristol area Knowledge experience in communications equipment and land systems is desirable Candidates must have an understanding of FMECA and RCM as well as Provisioning to AECMA 2000M Training Specialist SATCOM Requirement Training specialist to undertake the design and development of training courses and materials to support communications systems equipment Work will be undertaken in the Hampshire area ILS AR amp M Engineers Requirement Engineer to work in the Yorkshire Durham area Engineer to work in the Hampshire area Engineer to work in the Bristol and Somerset areas Knowledge experience in communications equipment and land systems is desirable Personnel and Companies can register their details requirements free of charge Initial contact can be made by e
120. oo much focus on tools in Communicator I don t intend to apolo gise for carrying such content firstly because the reality is that people are often employed on their tools skills whether we like it or not but more importantly because traffic on the online groups tells me that practical issues with tools consume members time and threaten their deadlines However it s vital for us to reflect the wide and growing range of skills demanded of technical communicators beyond tools With that in mind the rest of this issue focuses on ways of doing things Horace Hockley award winner Ron Blicq shares his experience of designing e learning courses to be studied without tutor support In our central illustra tion feature Philip Randall considers different techniques for adding graphics to websites John Rogers then discusses how to make a business case for buying tools Chris Pearson wraps up the parcel with brown paper in the second part of his series on how to map processes Our regular items look a little different with no Word workarounds or Tools of the trade but an extended final part of our Publishing series on preparing images for print in which Lewis Marshall investigates some of the problems that can arise in this process Citing your membership Every now and again there s confu sion about the ISTC acronym and Carol receives e mails on topics ranging from 4 Editorial Editorial Feedback on our new look
121. or checking the native design or crea tion software such as Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word This type of test is used in a workflow that involves submitting the original authoring docu ments to the printer for processing Common problems flagged by a preflighting test include Use of fonts that may not be shared across organisations and that are not embedded in the documents Use of graphics for which an original source is not available Use of other referenced assets that may extend outside the limits of the printable area such as spreadsheets Page and margin setups that are inconsistent or impractical to print a Graphics that are in an RGB colour space a Graphics that have been rotated within the document Postflighting describes the process of checking final files that have been created for the printer usually PDF or PostScript Common problems identi fied during a postflight test include Colour objects that are not suitable for the print process RGB LAB or Index Image files with inadequate resolution Image files with an excessively high compression setting PDF or PostScript level that may be incompatible with the final output device PDF security that may inhibit document changes or high resolution printing a Other graphic or textual objects on the page that may not reproduce correctly in print for example line weights in illustrations set to hairline or less than 0 25pt an
122. ousands of pages e working in all major software packages e in house design typesetting amp internet studios e performed on Macintosh and PC platforms e regularly translating into over 70 languages e translating millions of words every year e assisted by Trados translation memory tools ASK House Northgate Avenue Bury St Edmunds IP32 6BB Telephone 0870 042 2121 Fax 0870 042 2122 Email help ask group co uk www ask group co uk 26 Illustration Illustration Preparing winning images for websites Philip Randall outlines the essential points to consider when incorporating photographs and graphics into websites This article provides website builders with guidance on how to manipulate images photographs and graphics easily and effectively for inclusion in their web pages I say builders because I am not discussing here the skills or the tools that would be used by profes sional website designers since they are creating the kind of websites that require big budgets and lengthy times cales to develop The subject of image manipula tion is as broad as it is deep it covers such considerations as image size and format colour models and depth composition and cropping image effects and transformations and much much more Each of these topics merits an article in its own right and indeed several have been admirably covered in recent issues of Communicator Preparing an image for use on a web page sometimes requi
123. pany Secretary Carol Hewitt Member news New members Member Martin Andrassy Stephen Angell Tony Bennett Jeannette Brown Kevin Giblett Peter Godfrey Paul Llewellyn Alan Maynard Sean Nation Elizabeth Nixon Catherine Peters Rhona Sampson Andrew Simpson Ken Stapleton Susan Stocks John Straw Francis Wright Associates Carl Bernard Ann Marcus Quinn Stewart Mills Students Graeme Bisset Steven Edwards Simon Oughton Annette Sohor Peter Walton Joanne Warmsley Tony Parr Transfers Fellow Matthew Wailes Member Edmund Clayton Jeremy Delvarr Keith Morrison Adrian Toole Associate Trevor Gransden Hugh Longlands Paul Thomas Obituary Grays Gurney Stroud Sudbury Cambridge London Tetbury Brixham Galway Ireland Wokingham Kingsbridge Bath Wolverhampton Exmouth Royston Belper Bury St Edmunds Coventry lreland Galston Gosport Bridgewater Poole Dublin Northallerton Didcot West Wickham Nottingham Godalming London Boradstone Welwyn Garden City Plymouth Bridgend Callington The ISTC regrets to announce the passing of Lionel Lawson and offers its condolences to his family and friends Anew member of the ISTC having joined in 2003 Lionel worked for IMPRO Technologies in South Africa writing technical and operational software guides A man of many talents he held a pilot s licence and had won an Award for Excellence in the History of South African Literature
124. phs should be saved as JPEG since this format supports full colour 24 bits pixel yet still produces a reasonably small file JPEG can easily achieve 20 1 compression but the compression process loses some of the original data described as lossy However it is selective and removes colour related subtleties that the human eye cannot detect especially on a computer screen Be aware that every time you Save in JPEG you lose data Therefore try to keep your images in a lossless format until you have finalised the image that you will use Most of the leading image manipulation tools have their own native image format that is lossless use this to maintain your image library GIF supports transparency but JPEG does not so you are limited to having 256 colours in a transparent image A new format PNG Portable Network Graphic supports both transparency and 24 bit colour This format is likely to replace GIF in the future but should be used with caution at present as only the latest browsers support it For more detail on file formats refer to Better Screen Captures in the Autumn 2003 Communicator Insert the image in the web page Now you are ready to incorporate the image into a web page It is correctly composed and cropped sharp and clear and the file is as small as possible 28 Illustration Illustration k Peed Te p F n Fajt i se imam Re Se ie Coe Lee a E Puli Cee Doli VS mu MBO U sh DEN
125. pment experi enced by one member currently living somewhat north of Watford shows there is perhaps more truth to the north south divide than we d like He said employment agents keep asking whether they should put you forward for a job in the south because you might not be able to purchase a property due to high house prices Even if you have an interview and know that you can do the job you are confronted with the question Can he afford to move south We hope this was a rare incident please let us know if you have experi enced anything similar There also appears to be a divide between manufacturing and software Manufacturing is suffering with many companies unable to compete with third world prices and so projects are going abroad and the number of opportunities for technical authors has fallen This appears to be worse in the north of the country In comparison the IT industry seems to be picking up after last year s low and there are more opportunities for technical authors in this industry et me y m IC gt europe New president for TCeurope Congratulations go to Hanna Risku who was recently elected President of TCeurope Hanna is Finnish but is based in Austria working at the Danube University Krems near Vienna as Head of the Centre for Knowledge and Information Management and Deputy Head of the Department for Telecommunication Information and Media An expert in vocational educat
126. probably your best opportunity to get more infor mation At the end of your visit thank the customers for their time Explain that the information they have provided will improve the documentation Also give them a small gift of appreciation for their time a company mug company T shirt or gift certificate 8 Presenting your findings Do not wait long to write your report to management Customer Visit Report template It is a good idea for the team to meet and debrief after the customer visit to make sure you got the main points Your report does not need to be long Always include a one page summary for the executives who do not have time to look at all the details 9 Following up with the customer Follow up with your customer Send them a thank you letter Thank You Letter template If you promised that you would send some information or find out something deliver on your promise You will have gained a new loyal customer that will be willing to talk to you again 10 Reusing the work done for your next visit The final step is to learn from your visits and reuse what you have already done The first visit is the hardest but you will learn a lot from it Do not wait too long before visiting the next customer so that you can gather more information and improve your sample data Good luck and happy visiting E Francisco Abedrabbo is Director of Documentation for the Oracle Application Server at Oracle Lypp tek
127. provided but is not actually of any great value So they look to keep costs and conse quently the quality to a minimum So what do technical authors do that is of value to the organisation We believe that technical authors as well as specialist documentation compa nies are valuable to the organisation in several ways Explain technical information to a non technical audience in a clear and unambiguous way This is a fundamental part of producing user assistance enabling people to understand and it is the authoring part of technical authoring Moreover as life is getting more complex it seems unlikely that software will ever be developed that is so intuitive to use that users will never need any assistance Organise information so that people can find the information they need We call this skill information design It is sometimes called in Germany for example information development We believe that these skills in information design have a wider application to the business than just the development of user manuals procedures documents and Help files These skills organising information and providing the means by which people get that information can help organisations fight and win the information overload battle Our recommendations Technical authors skills need to be applied more widely across the organisation In other words create an Information Design department We
128. rally in US English Helix helixes Index indices in maths indexes in publishing and US English Millennium millennia Phenomenon phenomena again often used wrongly as a singular Referendum referenda or referendums Terminus termini Adding es here makes for quite a mouthful Vertex vertices or vertexes the latter generally in US English 2 Ease AX S axes Parenthesis parentheses 3 Ee and ess ASS asses Box boxes but ox oxen Dish dishes Latch latches 4 Eff and vees Beef beefs or beeves cattle archaic Hoof hoofs or hooves Leaf leaves Roof roofs older rooves Turf turfs or turves 5 Eye ee ess Community communities Family families 6 Oh ess Cargo cargoes Dynamo dynamos 7 Ou to ice House houses Louse lice Mouse as in the animal mice as in the pointing device mouses 8 Collective words Aircraft aircraft singular or plural Data data is not data are Equipment generally collective but according to circumstance can take an s Media increasingly the media is 9 Odds and ends Agenda agendas although strictly agenda is already plural Child children note the possessive children s books Court martial courts martial Passer by passers by 10 Punctuation Abbreviations and acronyms use CDs not CD s Dates use 1960s not 1960 s C References Chicago Manual of Style 15th edn 2003 Un
129. rations screen dumps warnings and cautions Electronic documentation Describes several types of Help and other on line information tools typography the use of colour and rules for the use of navigation and keyboard usage Informative annexes Several annexes provide further supporting material including Calling the standard from a contract Contains a sample contract clause and comments on tailoring the standard for this purpose A sample documentation plan Addresses the scope and limitations layout and writing style audience a draft table of contents deliverables copyright translation development process and controls production project team responsibilities resources requirements for usability testing and the schedule Relationships Defines relationships between audiences tasks and paper and online documentation Writing in English for translation Provides specific guidance on terminology style abbreviations confusing words syntax and punctuation physical factors on line information and cultural factors Estimating Addresses estimating including what activities are likely to be involved with each draft Assessing the documentation plan What to look for in the plan Sample style specification Provides a table of style elements and values and includes an index specification addressing content and references A bibliography of standards and other useful publications C Ric
130. re facilities For example entering XML and clicking Go returns five hits one from the Concise Oxford Dictionary and five from A Dictionary of the Internet The last is XML Schema Clicking this displays an entry containing two terms in blue These are cross refer ences to other entries Clicking these takes you into the associated entries which include cross references to more terms You can follow interesting lines of investigation until you find what you need You can also highlight words that do not have an embedded link and click CROSS REFERENCE to generate a secondary set of search results You can move between adjacent entries in a book using the left and right arrow buttons above the entry For tips on searching more success fully click HELP on the green bar near the top of the screen To return to the ISTC website from the Oxford page click HOME Please be sure to comply with Oxford s legal requirements when using the service To view these click Privacy Policy and Legal Notices at the bottom of the screen If you have any difficulty in logging in or using the service please contact Chris Pearson at chris chrispearson org Marian Newell FISTC E mail journal editor istc org uk Conference 2004 The 13th ISTC Annual Conference will take place on 8 10 October at the Oxford Belfry in Milton Common which is near Thame in Oxfordshire A stun ning courtyard complete with stone ornamentation an
131. res in depth knowledge of these topics and also access to appropriate tools However this article concentrates on the basics needed to illustrate a simple website like the one shown in Figure 1 The first question Before incorporating an image into a web page it is vital to answer one very important question do I really need this image on this page Remember that images especially photographs increase the loading time for the page and make it appear busier It is vital to balance the download time cost and the clutter that images produce against the value that each image will bring The points to consider in answering this question fall outside of the remit of this article so in order to proceed we will assume that you have decided that one or more images are essential and that you are ready to go Choice of tool It is tempting to seek out the most powerful image manipulation tool avail able to prepare your images but in fact simpler tools usually do it just as well they do it more quickly and they have the added value of being easier to learn and use Although website designers tend to use complex applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator the imaging application of choice for many website builders is Jasc Software s Paint Shop Pro This can be used for manipulating photographs and for creating graphics Some treat ments such as cropping rotating and simple air brushing can even be don
132. rigger terminator block in any process description with the terminator construct immediately following the description of the last element in the process The constructs ON and END can be used A process begins ON an event and its END follows the last event For example ON customer notifies changed reqt BEGIN order update END order update END Concluding article In the final article in this series we will look at creating relationship maps and cross functional maps We will also review some of the software that can help with process maps and process documentation together with some helpful resources for process mappers IC nas worked in development training and documentation since the mid 80s and mapped his first process in 1996 More recently he has taught Organisational Analysis at London South Bank University E mail chris chrispearson org Jalking technical in any language Lloyd International has been delivering proven technical translation solutions to manufacturing and engineering industries for 15 years Our technical translators are native speakers __ specialists in their fields their skills include translation of complex technical manuals and software localisation working in all major software and graphics packages on both PC and Mac platforms using the latest technologies and translation memory tools to deliver cost savings improved quality and consistency We re talking your
133. rmation Environmental perhaps making paper a minority medium gt Political perhaps regulations from the European Union for example will require more or better documentation Technological perhaps products becoming so user friendly that less documentation is needed 3 Communication talk to the customers we are after all professional communicators Are they happy with what we do Does our documentation enhance the product Ideally we need to communicate at two levels With the real customers the people who will use our docu We re talking mentation so that we provide what they need and want With the paymaster the per son who places the orders If you are lucky this may be a customer but especially in larger organisa tions this is often not the case In some ways this is the most important point because we deal with people and it is often our interactions with them that make or break a good working relationship I remember a talk at Conference that described a large contract which was awarded not on price or quality obviously impor tant and taken into consideration but on the fact that the customer felt that they could do business with the supplier 4 Determine what is needed to survive and flourish How much will it cost and can we do it cheaper If the cost is acceptable can we provide added value through bet ter quality W
134. rmation letter a few days before the meeting day Confirmation Letter template Bring the manuals that you plan to discuss with the customers Bring the small gift for the customer Plan ahead if you are taking them out to lunch Ask the customers if they have a favourite restaurant Visiting the customer Plan to arrive on time Many companies are very big never assume you have the correct building It is beneficial if the entire team arrives at the location at the same time Otherwise wait until everyone has arrived before calling your customer contact During your visit spend time listening Let your customers discuss their issues You are there to listen not talk So the more they talk the more information you get Be an investigator If they say to you I do not like the xyz guide ask them which parts they do not like Have they made any written comments on it Can you see them Do they have any notes they have created because the guide did not cover certain topics Do not make any promises that are beyond your control If a customer tells you that it would be nice if the product had a specific feature just tell them that you will pass that information to the development or research team If you are with several customers make sure to get everyone involved Taking the customer to lunch is a great idea They will be in a more relaxed environment and willing to discuss the issues more openly It is
135. rt term requirements where you need a piece of software to fix an immediate problem or want to make a small purchase of say 50 However I suggest that the method helps to ensure that sound business decisions are made on all tool purchases If we are to be businesslike and remain involved in the long term strategic planning of a company we must plan for all those small purchases because they soon accumulate into a large capital spend Working as a busi ness consultant I have been shocked by the number of redundant tools in organ isations tools which were unlikely to be used again Finally I am aware that ISTC members come from diverse backgrounds and have been trained in many different disciplines I was trained as a design engineer myself and initially thought that the business side of the organisa tion had little to do with me However I soon discovered that I could not think like that in an increasingly competitive world If businesses are to remain competi tive and keep their customers the people responsible for the design and support of the products need to become more business aware In short we must all broaden our thinking and consider how the tools that we buy support the development of the company s products and services We cannot evaluate tools in isolation without considering the full impact of our selections E is a Business Advisor and Freelance Writer Having starting out as an Electronics
136. rules used in graphics and tables This is because very light weights may not be printable within the tolerances of the printing process See Action f Note The stroke weights may be correctly applied in an illustration program but be careful how you scale graphics within authoring or DTP applications the stroke weight will be scaled in proportion 5 TrueType font use Error Most printers can process PDFs created using TrueType fonts However be aware that the TrueType file format includes a setting that allows the type designer to prevent the font being embedded in another application including the PDF file format Many Microsoft fonts do not allow embedding and so PDFs that use these fonts will have substitute fonts Fonts can be forced to embed but be aware you are breaking the license of the font creator Unless you are happy for font substitution to take place you will have to change the font 6 Hatched pattern Error the hatch patterns used by Microsoft art including charts and Word Art cause problems for print providers This is because the pattern is generated by using low resolution graphics that are superimposed to create the hatch effect Not only does the low resolution image produce coarse results in print but the hatch pattern can also cause interference patterns on the printed page See Action g Actions Now the errors have been identified what can be done The good news is that you can rectify mo
137. s 4 Existing documentation identifies any existing documentation for the product This may be existing manuals that are to be updated or specifications if it is a new product 5 Documentation needs identifies what documentation is required for example manuals or online help 6 Publication plan this is essentially a list of the documentation needed as determined by the user and task analysis in the research stage 7 Process and schedule identifies the milestones review process and approval or sign off procedures 8 Resources identifies the technical writers designers and graphic artists available It also includes any other groups that need to be involved such as quality assurance or testing and any tools required 9 Issues any issues that may affect delivery should be raised such as insufficient resources to meet the deadlines Budget control A vital part of the planning process is getting the budget right the aim is not only to produce excellent documen tation on schedule but also to make money Costing Excluding printing the main cost factors that need to be considered are 1 Direct labour costs such as writers CAD engineers illustrators technical clerks and administration staff 2 Materials such as paper and CDs 3 Office overheads such as PCs software and other equipment that might be bought or hired 4 Indirect labour costs such as holidays and sick leave Documentation is labour inten
138. scribed by Mr Burns True a user can choose which SCOs within a course they want to view but they can still only select or deselect those SCOs that the content developer has thought fit to include in the course One of the interesting capabilities of SCORM however is exactly how the user chooses which SCOs to view With a SCORM compliant course it is possible for a user to take a pre test which assesses their existing knowl edge and then be presented by the LMS with only those SCOs within the pre built course that contain material that they do not already know In fact the user may not even know that the course contains any SCOs other than the ones they see In this way individual users can receive training specific to their individual needs even if they don t completely know what these needs are themselves This possibility although not mentioned by Mr Burns is one of the most powerful arguments for SCORM and is what provides the user with the ability to build a course in an almost tailor made fashion These minor quibbles aside I thank Mr Burns for describing a complex cutting edge topic in such an accessible manner IH The virtues of translation Dave Cooper MISTC The newly enlarged European Union now has some 20 official languages and there are many speakers of minority languages such as Basque Catalan and Turkish whose needs must also be addressed As well as bei
139. sis and testing The documentation plan Outlines the documentation s title and scope together with audience definition objectives draft tables of contents deliverables ownership of copyright translation requirements procedures and controls production methods and tools team structure estimates of time and costs change control and review and a schedule Review Covers responsibilities for the documentation plan review the first and second draft and proof reviews Usability testing Addresses usability planning and objectives test subjects responsibilities and the process for determining the need for additional testing Documentation subcontracted to other companies Identifies the conformance needs for the subcontracted documentation and assigns the roles of the documenter and subcontractor Change control and document maintenance Describes the four types of changes possible in the documentation plan and how those changes can be incorporated 9 2 Content of style specification This sub clause covers a Writing style Identifies the language and spelling dictionary to be used along with grammar and usage Paper documentation Includes paper sizes and quality orientation print resolution margins ink colours dividers reproduction and binding page table and illustration numbering footnotes headers and footers captions foldouts front and end matter typography graphics tables and illust
140. sition purposes and it ends up smaller than you require The art of cropping images was thoroughly covered in the illustration showcase in the Autumn 2003 Communicator I strongly recommend you follow the advice given there You can crop graphics and photographs as required Calculate required image size The size needs to be measured in pixels and will be dependent upon the viewing size screen resolution of the typical site visitor s computer Usually any single image especially one on the home page or a key navigation page should not be more than one quarter of the total screen size preferably smaller as you need some text and white space as well Viewed on a typical visitor s web browser running at 800x600 pixels an image will be no more than 400x300 pixels Calculate your required size and use the value in the next step Note Many websites now assume that the typical site visitor is using a screen resolution of 1024x768 You must decide what your typical Figure 2 Using a map to show Ax geographical locations ao i E i x ET 2 E gf visitor is likely to have and adjust your image sizes and web page layout accordingly Resize the picture Resizing also called resampling involves removing or adding pixels to decrease or increase a picture s size For websites we usually want to remove from large pictures detailed infor mation that will be too small for the human eye to
141. sive and by far the major cost is the manpower To calculate the cost of the project you can create an estimating table in a spreadsheet package like Microsoft Excel Down the left hand side of the table list each document and the chapters in it Across the top of the table list everyone who may be involved writers illustrators administration staff managers and so on Then fill in 36 Writing O the number of hours for each person add these up and multiply by the appro priate hourly rate Of course the basic hourly rate is not the true cost to the company Taking into account all the overheads Hackos estimates that the actual cost for most US companies is 2 5 3 times the rate paid to their employees Generally speaking the cost to the customer is the sum of the costs listed above plus a profit margin and VAT if applicable Control Once you ve worked out the budget and started the job the aim is to ensure that you stick to it if you don t then there may not be any profit To keep control the project must be regularly monitored and supervised to ensure that those working on it are operating within the specified cost and time constraints Any deviation must be dealt with as soon as possible and the project steered back on course There will usually be some slippage and you should have allowed some leeway in the estimates but time lost in some areas may be made up in others If the slippage is du
142. st errors at the PDF stage using Enfocus PitStop Of the actions listed below all but two can be rectified using a PitStop Action or Global Change Actions e f can be recti fied as part of the preflight check a The PDF page size should be extended by 30mm to accommodate trim marks b A step wedge should be added to aid the on press checking of tone reproduction c Registration marks should be added to aid on press registration checking d Colour bars should be added to aid on press ink density measurement e All RGB colourised objects should be converted to CMYK f All stroke weights should be increased to press tolerances g Hatch patterns should be removed and replaced with flat colour Once you have made these changes your document is ready to print Figure 3 By building preflight and postflight testing into your workflow you are able to transform documents created in applications with little or no print functionality into press ready files I hope you have found this series of articles useful The technical issues associated with creating press ready artwork are complex but as technical communicators often produce files for printing it is worth familiarising your self with the basics at least Be aware of the stages at which problems can arise and never assume that the printed output will automatically match what you saw on your monitor El Useful websites http ep pennnet com http graphi
143. t a b c d CD o Se A E ee m TG E u LILI E Figure 3 Final document Note Some of the generic tests are configured to support industry standards One is PDF X which is an international standard ISO 15930 1 2001 created by the Periodical Publishers Association PPA and now supported by the job options in Acrobat Distiller Preflight tests can be configured to return feedback on errors to the user or to correct errors automatically where possible Results Figure 2 shows the problems identi fied by testing the document in Figure 1 Most preflight applications catego rise problems as errors and warnings Errors are serious they should be corrected or the document may not be processed Warnings are cautionary final results may be disappointing The highlighted problems are 1 No printer s marks Error a print workflow requires page marks to help control the processing of the document See Actions a d 2 RGB colourised text Error Text is formatted using an RGB colour palette and must be converted to CMYK before the PDF is processed for printing plates See Action e 3 RGB colourised graphic Error A graphic may have been created in CMYK with a design tool but was converted to RGB when the PDF was made Like text the graphic must be converted to CMYK See Action e 4 Stroke weight less than 0 25pt Warning A lower limit is placed on the stroke weight of
144. t size and menu bar style contributed to the overall coherence of a webpage Keynote speakers Six diverse speakers opened and closed the three days A high point was Saul Carliner former President of the STC discussing The design of online docu ments and studying the various genres of online communication from a cogni tive psychological perspective Finally David Sless Director of the Communication Research Institute of Australia drew on 20 years experience to discuss standards in the design of public documents C Noel Reid is an Associate of the ISTC and a co opted Council member E mail noelreid yahoo com News from the ISTC Council It was a dull day on 8 May when eight people attended the 172nd Council meeting in the University of London Union in Malet Street There was nothing unusual on the agenda with the main business being concerned with the preparations for this year s Conference However thanks to encouraging financial news and progress on several initiatives and activities it proved to be one of the most positive meetings we ve had in recent times Oxford Reference Online The OUP resources are now available on line for ISTC members and have been well received The other new benefit discounted British Standards is being taken up albeit only slowly Articles of Association Caroline Bucklow has carried out a review of the ISTC s Articles of Association She has suggested a lot
145. t the sort of problems that typically arise Why doesn t the printed image look like it did on the screen and Why do I have SO many last minute problems with print projects Many of us have asked these questions as we reflect on disap pointing print results Most of us would probably say that pictures are desirable in many published documents and essential in some However there is no doubt that pictures can cause as many problems for a document s creator as they solve for its reader In this article we explore the reasons behind some of the most common complaints when printed documents fail to meet expectations We will look at how we can control the materials we use for print and how we can optimise the way we view images and documents for print Print materials Problem When an RGB red green blue original is printed using CMYK cyan magenta yellow black inks the inks may not be able to reproduce the saturation colour purity seen on a monitor This effect may be exacerbated by the use of uncoated or off white paper which can suppress colour saturation or introduce a colour cast Solutions Speak to your print provider about the inks being used in previous articles we discussed printing inks and how conversion for print is dependent on materials like inks Ensure any colour space conversion is optimised for the print process Try to ensure that documents are processed according to the paper
146. taining a parallelism creating abbreviations and acronyms and writing numerals in narrative Business Letters and Memos explains how to write informative and persuasive types of correspondence Short Reports teaches how to organise and write coherent incident field trip inspection progress and project completion reports Formal Reports covers planning and writing investigation and evaluation reports feasibility studies and compara tive analyses Business and Technical Proposals covers planning and writing informal and semi formal proposals Embedded methodology Recognising that e learners work alone and need to feel comfortable with the on screen information Lisa created a design plan that would encourage participants to continue working on the courses Here are some of the key techniques we built into the learning experience Limiting the amount of information on a screen so that users have to scroll down only occasionally Presenting information in short chunks that is short paragraphs a Inserting user activity at least every fourth screen Keeping word choice simple without talking down to allow for a wide range of users a Stating the approximate time required to complete each course on the first screen to help users budget their time a Dividing the material in each course into approximately 30 minute segments with a Pause Point screen inserted at the end
147. tatic experience It is also part of a worldwide problem people simply do not want to enrol in any writing course fearing it will be similar to the writing courses they experienced at school We have yet to discover a way to overcome that reluctance Conclusions This brief article covers just a few of the factors affecting our development of a stand alone e learning programme One aspect is immediately evident writing a highly interactive self evaluated writing course demands a significant amount of time and imagination and results ina large number of screens over 1100 for our eight courses The result however we feel has fully justified the effort ICI is a senior consultant with RGI International Inc in Winnipeg Canada and has taught technical communication for over 35 years His background includes military aviation technical editing and heading the Technical Communication Department at Red River College A Fellow of both the STC and the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing he is a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE and the Immediate Past President of INTECOM E mail rono rgilearning com Website www rgilearning com si U a U place your trust in a company that speaks your language e using only specialist mother tongue translators e translating ASP Java Flash and XML pages e technical documentation specialists since 1989 e desktop publishing th
148. tering e mail awards istc org uk for details If you would like to sponsor an award please contact Carol Hewitt on 01733 390141 or istc istc org uk El Taxing times It s that time of year again yes tax returns Don t forget that you can reclaim your ISTC membership fees against tax Up to the last six years may be claimed providing you have not already claimed them of course with the proviso that they were paid out of your earned income It may be wise to keep the invoices and membership cards for each year you are claiming as they are proof of the amount you are claiming and that you have paid the money to the ISTC You may be able to prove payments in some other way such as your bank or credit card statements It is not a requirement to send proof with your Tax Return but such proof must be available if requested Unfortunately the ISTC cannot provide summary receipts so we ask you to main tain your own records The table below shows the member ship fees for this and the previous five years There is no VAT included in these rates it is not required so you cannot claim VAT back that could be embar rassing if Customs and Excise decide to audit your books As the ISTC is registered with the Inland Revenue as a professional organisation you can claim with confidence and reap the benefit have 2004 2003 1 2000 1999 Fellow 80 70 64 Member 7 70 o f 53 Associate 760 50 43 22
149. tflight server workflow Multiple users submit source docu ments to a server process that runs checks Depending on the severity of any errors found the author may be asked to correct and re submit the document or the document may be passed to an automated PDF creation tool The PDF is checked and feedback may be sent to the user Alternatively the document may be sent to a prepress specialist for modification or sent to an automated process for correction a The user may have to consider using an alternative authoring application one that is supported by preflight applications a Checks can be made with Mekon MDocChecker and MPDFMaker Markzware FlightCheck Workflow and Enfocus Pitstop Server Bringing it all together In this series of articles on preparing images for print we have considered a Characteristics of raster files Resolution issues Colour issues Print issues Workflow issues 44 Publishing Publishing The following section is a brief exercise that brings small aspects of all of these issues together in the form of a PDF postflight workflow Document creation For the purpose of this exercise it is assumed that the user creates docu ments in Microsoft Word These documents contain black and coloured text raster images and business graphics such as charts Output requirement One of the required output media is professional print using medium to long run printing
150. tions is ensured A study comparing computer generated instructions with factory provided instructions showed that the computer generated instructions reduced assembly time by an average of 35 and errors by 90 For details of this and similar research visit http graphics stanford edu maneesh Summary Designing instructions based upon general design principles derived from cognitive science has demonstrable advantages These principles can provide a starting point for the designer that restricts the number of possible design options and informs particular decisions However this top down approach is not sufficient as it cannot identify the trade offs that will occur in some situations The design may have to accommodate particular circum stances in which case a bottom up approach can also be appropriate Understanding how people perform tasks does inform instruction and diagram design but it also demon strates the difficulty in producing instructions that can work for a range of users with differing aptitudes Where the benefits justify the costs the most powerful approach is to combine design principles with sound empirical iterative design Zacks amp Tversky 2003 IE References Agrawala M Phan D Heiser J Haymaker J Klingner J Hanrahan P and Tversky B 2003 Designing Effective Step By Step Assembly Instructions SIGGRAPH 2003 pp 828 837 Hegarty M and Just M A 1993 Constructing menta
151. tly under revision by ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 7 WG 2 System software documentation What is ISO IEC 15910 Documentation is often considered as something to be produced after the software has been developed Quality documentation has to be planned and prepared as an integral part of the soft ware development process The main purpose of this standard is to provide guidance on the creation of a compre hensive plan for developing software documentation by specifying what needs to be done and by whom To conform to ISO IEC 15910 the plan must include a style specification The standard describes what the style specification must cover together with what forms of information the acquirer is to make available to the documenter and who is responsible for reviewing and reproducing the documentation ISO IEC 15910 specifies the minimum process for creating all forms of user documentation for software It can be applied to both printed and on line documentation It is intended for use in a two party situation by anyone who produces or purchases user documen tation it can also be used to form the basis of a business contract Clause 9 contains conformance requirements in two sub clauses 9 1 The documentation process This sub clause covers The provision of source material Details the material to which the acquirer shall provide access to the documenter including specifications the software developers and typical users for analy
152. top s editing tools to cor rect the error at PDF stage Note The user continues to use his or her original authoring application and Adobe Acrobat PitStop or FlightCheck are both powerful products that can be customised through scripting and macros by the user or a third party developer Solution 2 PDF server workflow Multiple users create documents and send PDF files to a hot folder a A server product detects new documents and automatically runs postflight checks Documents are passed to other folders where PitStop then applies PDF editing routines to correct pages or to make changes to documents that were not possible in the source application for example converting colour to CMYK or adding printer s marks to the page Checks are made with Enfocus PitStop Server An offline automated PitStop service this can be configured to intercept docu ments using hot folders to check and correct PDF files Markzware FlightCheck Workflow Again this is a server product with the same function ality as the desktop alternative It differs from PitStop in that although it allows checks to be made on source documents it does not provide PitStop s PDF editing capabilities Note The user continues to use his or her original authoring application and Adobe Acrobat with these prod ucts Again the user or a third party developer can configure PitStop or FlightCheck Solution 3 the preflight and pos
153. toward the end of the segment Here is how it works Example 1 A typical question Step 2 Select the correct statement The opening paragraph of an incident report must always contain two brief pieces of information A What happened the result B Who was involved what happened C Place date and time the result Step 1 comprises two or three screens of information and general instruction Step 2 asks a question to test the partic ipants understanding The question has three possible answers from which to choose see Example 1 Step 3 takes the participants to one of three responses each corresponding to the answer they select Roger selected the correct answer A and so goes to the Correct screen The screen informs him that he selected the correct answer and then in case he was unsure and selected the answer randomly it explains why Connect q Se Fi KOME Wrong Araver B Figure 1 Streamed learning process bine inaction Terong Aiad ri u the answer is correct thus providing additional reinforcement The programme then takes him directly to Step 9 which provides information on the next concept he has to learn Sam and Trevor both selected a wrong answer Sam chose B while Trevor chose C and the programme takes them to the appropriate Wrong Answer screens The screens inform each of them with a different message that their answer is incorrect and e
154. urope I developed a correspondence course that had some 30 instructor markers in widespread locations This was followed in 1986 by a multimedia remote learning course that was used until 1998 This was the precursor of the Web based course described here In 1992 I teamed up with Lisa Moretto who until then was a learning products engineer for Hewlett Packard Limited in the UK and since then we have presented numerous workshop type courses to major organisations in Canada the US and Europe Our objective has been consistent to find ways that will help engineers and other professionals streamline their writing and present their information more effectively By mid 2000 however we recognised that the worldwide trend to e learning meant we also had to deliver our courses through the Internet Establishing objectives Early in our deliberations we decided to eliminate the need for the user to interact with an instructor This would not only reduce course cost but also permit users to access the course at convenient times rather than scheduled times However that decision meant we would have to develop a learning strategy in which course participants would have to evaluate their own work As just the two of us would be developing the course we divided our responsibilities As Lisa holds a Masters Degree in Interface Design from London Guildhall University she would devise the interface and convert the courses from MS Word to
155. ut whether to use a or an before the word historical The New Fowler s Modern English Usage 1966 edition allows both There is some guidance at www english usage com fag html fxaanbef Date formatting Concerning turning off automatic date formatting in Excel 2003 the following advice was given select the cell or column you want to format from the menu bar click Format Cells select the Number tab and click on Date in the category box then select the date format you prefer Not just technology Jeff Veen consultant and author says that technology is not the main part of a content management system but that editorship and a proper publications policy are the essential qualities For details visit www adaptivepath com publications essays archives 000315 php Converting PDF to JPEG Paint Shop Pro 8 will open PDF documents and one can Save As in JPEG Using this method JPEG quality seems quite good compared with files produced using Adobe Illustrator Spam alert Our attention was drawn to how spammers have taken advantage of non delivery reports to disguise their bulk e mails To find out more visit www sophos com spaminfo articles ndrwp html www sophos com spaminfo whitepapers index html This can also be an efficient way of delivering viruses C 1 q AJ F p An a a a Wlilear REA Lane Dal TA Jo Wilson BEd Hons PgCTA z E mail Si
156. will lose money if that student unfortunately fails ISTC handbook There was a discussion about the ISTC handbook and its relevance to present examination syllabuses The general view was that it needs to be completely rewritten another project for an able volunteer to coordinate International A discussion on international affairs which are looked after by David Cooper and Alan Fisk revealed that various guides for instructions are now available for viewing on the INTECOM website Forum 2007 will be in Amsterdam Membership The membership is still not as strong as it should be just under 900 at the last count In a general discussion the Membership Committee represented by Ian Wood commented that CVs received from prospective members were to put it gently not very good It is not that would be members lack experience but that too many CVs contain spelling mistakes typos and poor layouts For applications to join a communication institute this is not good If present members are encouraging people to join as I am sure they all are then would they please stress the necessity of a well presented application Documentation awards Conference will host the ISTC s annual documentation awards The categories are currently being reviewed to ensure that the awards offer an opportunity for as many ISTC members to enter as possible Last year saw excellent entries in most of the categories If you are interested in en
157. wing what order to put the colours in and what proportion to use for each The starting point is to appreciate that every colour has three characteris tics hue lightness and saturation The hue is a colour on the colour wheel lightness and saturation are adjusted Figure 1 Shades of red and green to give different shades of the hue The book s examples mainly use eleven distinct hues with four shades for each These 44 colours plus 17 others form the book s palette of colours For two hues Figure 1 shows from top to bottom the following shades light dull vivid and dark For my documents policies and procedures I didn t want anything fancy just two colours to break the monotony of black text on a white background a darkish colour for the headings and the navigation icons m a lighter colour for the panel that contains the icons Working through the book s samples I experimented in my documents with combinations of two colours that had either the same hue similar hues complementary hues or contrasting hues It is essential to test colour schemes in context some combinations I tried were pleasing aesthetically but they didn t meet my specific require ments This confirmed the author s advice that a colour scheme should always reflect a design s purpose and its intended audience a concept that is familiar to technical communicators Figure 2 shows some of the combi nations t
158. work at this colour depth Select the Preset Shapes drawing tool and then select the rounded rectangle shape Figure 3a The Preset Shapes tool allows you to create a wide range of geometric vector shapes that are instantly converted to a bitmap image when sized and placed on the canvas Note that Anti alias is turned on in the control panel to the right This feature feathers the edges of the rectangle into the background by using shades of the selected line colour this gives a neater edge to curved and diagonal lines when viewed onscreen It is also used to make text clearer on screen anti aliasing can be seen at work on the edges of the square drawn in Figure 3a and in the text in Figure 3d note the results in Figure 1 On the canvas draw a square to the full height of the canvas and to the left side Check the pixel guide at the bottom left corner of the screen to ensure the shape is actually square this will produce correctly rounded corners Use the Select tool to select the right hand half of the image and drag it across to the other side of the canvas Figure 3b Use the Clone tool to extend the top and bottom bars The Clone tool works by replicating a chosen section of the image in another location Here we select existing sections of the horizontal bars and clone them across the canvas to complete the rectangle By using the Clone tool we can reproduce the anti aliasing effect of the line in
159. www techscribe co uk thesis thesis html I fancied staying in academia and was involved with an English Japanese language translation project while trying to get more papers published but funding ran out and I spent three months on the dole It was not a nice place to be On the strength of my academic work I convinced the MD 50 Member profile Member profile We talk to Mike Unwalla a member of the independent Authors Special Interest Group who has recently upgraded to become a Fellow of the ISTC of a software house that I was just the person he was looking for The combination of English language skills teaching ability and technical competence is powerful and it puts TechScribe in a strong position What is the most rewarding aspect of your work When customers and their clients praise my work I get a real buzz It s nice to know that the documentation I produce helps people get on with their work The other thing that gives me great pleasure is when I finally understand the system and see how all the bits fit together It s like completing a jigsaw puzzle or crossword And of course seeing a finished artefact be it a printed manual or a piece of online help is very rewarding What is the hardest aspect Gaining new clients it takes a tremen dous amount of time and effort What have been the biggest changes in the last five years Remote working is the biggest change as far as I m concerned Much
160. xpectations Cultural and linguistic differences aside context and expectations can be just as important even when the two parties are not divided by culture or language differences Language relies to a degree of which we are largely unaware in common use on the prior knowledge and expectations of the hearer or reader To be understood fully and clearly information has to be couched using the style and vocabu lary specific to the recipient I found a classic example of this on a large box containing a domestic appliance The English version of the text on one end of the box read Do not stand on this end which means of course that that end of the box should not be placed on the ground The French version obviously translated by someone given the words but no context instructed the reader not to stand on that end of the box a translation so laughable that it risked diluting the serious message The communicator whether a technical author or a translator needs to be sure that readers understand problems Translation is often made the scapegoat for poor communication and people like to make much of the humour in bad translations But such translations are not bad translations they are grossly incompetent translations Good translation like good technical writing happens when a Skilled professional considers the knowledge and expectations of readers evaluates the situation in which they have to take in inform
161. xplains why It then takes them to the appropriate More Instruction screen in Step 4 Step 4 provides one or two screens of additional information designed to help the participant understand the topic better Sometimes a common screen follows both wrong answers More often however a separate set of information is provided following each wrong answer to correct the inaccurate understanding identified by the partici pant s choice of answer in Step 2 Step 5 asks a second question again with several possible answers This rarely repeats the question posed at Step 2 rather it tests how well the participant has learned the new infor mation This time answer C is correct Step 6 again takes Sam and Trevor to a particular screen depending on which of the answers they select Sam selected the correct answer C and so is taken to the Correct Answer screen which tells him that his answer is correct and provides reinforcement in case he randomly chose that answer From there he is taken immediately to Screen 9 where he starts learning a new unit of information Trevor selected an incorrect answer A or B and is taken to the Wrong Answer screen that responds to his choice Each screen tells him his choice is incorrect and explains why It then takes him to Screen 7 Step 7 provides more information to improve Trevor s learning The example in Figure 1 shows how the programme adjusts according to the partic
162. y looking at the results and working out what kinds of tools will accomplish the requirements For example you may conclude that you need a database version control software and a distiller to generate PDF documents You then need to decide which particular tools best meet the requirements identified not forgetting to take into account tools that are already in use within your CO organisation as well as others available on the market Business decisions Once armed with this information we have to think about the business case for purchasing new tools If your investigations indicate that this is an appropriate solution you will have to justify the purchase The justification should make good business sense rather than simply claiming We have this problem and this tool will do the job so I say we should purchase it This may sound amusing but I have seen justifications put together on that basis and some have even persuaded people to part with good company money to purchase the requested item A good justification should show not only the results of your investiga tion and why you selected the tool but also how the tool would benefit the company from a monetary perspective Describe the added value it will give to the company and how it will pay back the investment If you cannot do this you will instead have to devise a set of procedures for using existing tools to achieved the required result educate users in the

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