Last night's Networking event

Last night's networking event was very enjoyable, with the discussion moving from Swiss national service, Canadian accents to finding the best DITA authoring tool for creating online Help.

For once this month, it didn't rain in the evening.

On another note, our Web site and email was down for a little while this morning. It should be fixed now.

Harry Potter and the deathly Help file

Last night, my family and I went to the midnight party of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" at The Lion and the Unicorn book shop in Richmond upon Thames, Surrey. This children's book shop is located in a narrow paved alley, so the queue of 100-odd people dressed up as wizards conjured up an image straight out of Diagon Alley.

So what does this have to with Help files? Walking back to the car park, I remembered that, in the distant past, in our time at Digitext, we wrote the text for the Helper character in "Lego Creator Harry Potter". We were asked to write help text appropriate for an eight-year old boy (Lego is for boys, apparently). This lead to issues like, do eight-year olds understand the word "cylinder"? It was agreed they didn't, so we had to come up with an alternative term that would work internationally. We eventually settled on "this type of object is like a baked bean tin". It was a great project to work on.

My 8 year old bounced out of bed, six hours later (groan). How do they do that?

Technical Authors writing test - Free

Free writing test for you to use when you're interviewing.

We offer a free writing test you can use to help you assess candidates. Contact us if you'd like a copy. Note: For prospective employers only - sorry, not available to candidates.

Technical Author Jobs

Just thought I'd highlight three vacancies we're currently working on:

#2738 Technical Author, Maternity cover 9-13 months, NW London, £36K-£42K pa
Our client, a FTSE 100 company, is looking for someone to provide maternity cover for one of its technical authors.The job is a contract for 9 months, which may be extended to 13 months. It might be converted to a permanent job, if the current holder decides not to come back to this role.

#2737 Technical Author, Manchester, £28K + benefits
Our client is looking to a recruit a technical author to join its team. This international company is the leader in developing software for retail organisations. You'll be joining a team that develops user documentation for its main software product. You'll also be involved in developing new ways to produce the documentation, because they want to move towards a structured, component based (e.g. XML), approach to producing Help, training courseware and other documents.

#2655 Senior Technical Author, London WC1, £40K-£42K
Our client is looking for a quick witted technical author to join its documentation team. You'll be documenting a very successful financial software package used by people investigating financial irregularities.


See our vacancies page for more details.

Nine little known secrets about creating great user information

We've written a new article on nine little known secrets about creating great user information.

Please read our article to find out more.

Six biggest mistakes Project Managers make with documentation and how to avoid them

We've written a new article on the six biggest mistakes Project Managers make with documentation and how to avoid them.

They are:

1. They don't communicate their central message and their desired outcome.
2. They are inconsistent or unclear in what they want to say.
3. They don't use the best style of language.
4. They leave insufficient time to write the information, or spend too much time on presentation.
5. They present the information badly.
6. They don't have a manageable way to maintain the information.

Please read our article to find out more.

MadCap Flare Version 3 released

Version 3 highlights (from the press release):

Source Control Integration
- Direct integration with Microsoft Visual Source Safe and Microsoft Team Foundation Server
- Integration with most other industry source control systems (that use the MS SCC API interface)

WebHelp Plus
- Faster server-side search
- Searching of non-HTML content (MS Word documents, PDF files, etc.)
- Automatic runtime merging of projects without any in-project work
- Auto-merged search functionality
- Auto-merged TOC options

Advanced FrameMaker Import and Support
- Pass-through marker support (pass raw content or data from FrameMaker to Flare without any processing or modification)
- Drop-down support
- TopicAlias marker support
- Hypertext Marker / Jump to Named Destination support

Enhanced Style Support
- Expanded table print styles for more control when sending output to MS Word, FrameMaker, or PDF
- Optional basic Style Editor for the new user
- Import styles
- Search highlight styles (customize search highlight colors)

User Interface
- Carrot tag neighborhood markers(a new method for working with inline formatting when necessary)
- New TOC grid view provides more control over TOC editing
- New customizable columns for various Flare interface screens

For a full list of new features and enhancements in Flare v3,see: http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/features.aspx#v3

MadCap Feedback Service is also now available. With the Feedback Service. Now you can get feedback on how your audience uses your Help content, maximizing the effectiveness of your documentation.

XML internationalization

The W3C has issued a working draft on best practices for XML internationalization. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#contents.

Displaying Help as a toolbar in Word

Here is an innovative way to provide users with access to documentation: a small (622KB) add-in that adds a "Get Started" tab to the Ribbon in Word 2007. The tab is a set of redirects to Word 2007 Help topics, demos, animated guides and support resources on Microsoft's Office Online Web site. There are also "Getting Started" tabs for Excel 2007 & PowerPoint 2007.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=F587370C-FDAE-4EDE-B528-AC58031A5DFF&displaylang=en

26th July - a date for your diaries

Cherryleaf and the Society for Technical Communication's UK Chapter invite you to a London summer social evening on Thursday 26th July at 7pm. The venue is by the Central Bar on Level 2 of the newly re-opened Royal Festival Hall in London's SouthBank Centre. This is an opportunity to socialise and network in a relaxed atmosphere. Please contact us if you'd like to come.

Free tool for opening Word 2007 documents in Word 2003

Martin Lewis, the money saving expert, has just mentioned Microsoft offers a free tool for opening Word 2007 documents in Word 2003.

If your computer is using Microsoft Office 2003, XP or 2000 programs, download the Compatibility Pack from Microsoft.

You may need to install software updates before the compatibility pack. See the compatibility pack overview section for more information.