RE: STC Letter to the Editor

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Plato [mailto:gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 2:50 AM
[...]
> Sure, but this is stuff any writer should already know before 
> they even show up
> to work. On day one I expect a writer to know their way 
> around Frame or Word, be
> able to make information gathering more effecient, and pick 
> fonts in about 20
> seconds. This is basic, 101 level information all writers 
> should have and does
> not require a great deal of debate. 
> 
> Once you have all these skills, then you're ready to actually 
> start putting some
> rubber to the pavement and writing content. 

You get to hire people who already know all the tools 
that they'll be required to use, so they can indeed 
devote 111% of their time exclusively to learning... 
well, I get the impression that anybody who works for 
you is also pre-selected for muon-level networking 
and security knowledge ... ok, then, to writing about 
what they already know, using tools that already 
work, and that they've already mastered.

The last two places where I came in as a tech writer, 
I had to learn to work in a new (to me) tool (or several), 
while getting up to speed on the employer's tech. More, I 
had to install and configure the tools, because I 
was the only one in the building using them, so the 
IT people had no clue.

In addition, I did run into gnarly font issues, because 
the company (in one case) had to be dragged kicking 
and screaming into accountability, because they'd 
settled on a lovely corporate font that:

a) they didn't own

b) didn't work cross-platform

c) was incomplete for some of the stuff I needed to do. 

Unless you can control your environment and have a great 
deal of control over what the customer accepts, then in 
many cases, font-fondling and layout and other presentation 
issues are either ongoing or recurring.  An example that 
I mentioned in another post is the Marketing Department 
that justifies their existence by doing a makeover every 
year or three.  This latest time, they thought it would 
be a half hour's work for me to simply incorporate the 
lovely template that they'd created (over several weeks...)
in Quark.  It took some explaining that their template 
could be used as a model, but could not be simply 
"imported" into FrameMaker or Word.

In order to disabuse them of the notion that I should 
just switch to Quark, I gave the graphics guy a text-only 
dump of my last 300-page manual. Needing to prove something, 
he put in overtime to Quark-ify it over the next few days, 
and then he came back to me with a superior smile and the 
document all lovely in Quark.

So, I gave him eleven simple changes to make... and then 
told him to update the ToC and Index and get it back 
to me by noon with the cross-references in place for 
PDF and HTML versions.  He's less smug now, and has 
developed a thing for "division of labor".  Works for me.

/kevin


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