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Subject:RE: Mil Specs and IETM question From:bryan -dot- westbrook -at- amd -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 13 Jul 2001 09:13:24 -0500
Unless you will be working as a lone writer (are there any lone military
writers?) or as some sort of supervisor, you will probably never lay eyes on
the actual Mil Specs. I spent over 2 1/2 years writing on the FMTV
("trucks" to us civilians) project for a TACOM contractor, and I never saw
one of the Mil Specs except in passing.
I wrote (or re-wrote) at least half of the troubleshooting for the Army's
first Class V IETM (and the level of t/s interaction between the manual
itself and the hardware is what sets Class V above Class IV). As far as
higher level IETM's (actually, the first 2 or 3 classes are just ETM's
because they offer no interactivity) go, there will not be much stylistic
variation possible, and we actually had to make exceptions to the Mil Spec
because the software (that was developed under a military contract) could
not be made to exactly meet the spec.
We used a program called EMS-2, which was pretty much just a group of SGML
DTD's and a collection of macros sitting on top of Microsoft SGML Author
(running on top of Word 95 because MS abandoned SGML Author after that
version). It was very problematic (there were a lot of errors that we never
understood), but from what I've heard it was supposed to be a lot more
stable than the alternatives.
-----Original Message-----
From: Beth Kane [mailto:kanerb -at- concentric -dot- net]
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2001 5:11 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Mil Specs and IETM question
ANY other misc. info you might have about Mil Specs is welcome, too.
Oh, and while I'm begging for info, I'd also like to know whether any of you
can tell me a little about "Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals
(IETM)." I had never heard that term. What type of software is used to
create them?
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