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I knew there had to be someplace left still doing things this way.
In the "olden days," we tech writers were engineers, lab techs
or other technical specialists, and devoted 100% of our time to
researching and verifying content. IMO, if you have such tech-adept
writers, having someone else handle the "font fondling" produces
documents that are technically superior and more consistently
formatted as well (though in your case you need to do something
to rein in the DTP operators who seem bent on editing content on
their own and put more responsibility on your composition group to
proof their output against writer input). However, if your writing
team consists of "technical communicators" who depend on SMEs
for both input and verification, then you'd probably be better off
trying to convert the DTP headcount to additional writers (though
it wouldn't be 1:1, if you're lucky you might get two writers for every
three DTP ops).
Gene Kim-Eng
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Bolton" <ERICB -at- marvin -dot- com
You can probably sense my frustration with this process. Which begs the
question, why can't we just do the composition and layout ourselves, like most
technical writers do?! I'm certainly able. I have a bachelor's degree and have
as much formal training with the publishing software as our composition people
(none).
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