Technical Writing: XML anyone?

Life Technology
1

Which software is used for product manuals in your company?

  • Word
  • PageMaker
  • FrameMaker
  • Quark
  • Other

0 voters

I’m curious about the technical writing done at other companies in Taiwan. I’m working for a medium-sized computer systems maker in Taipei with about 1,000 products.

We have moved from PageMaker and Word documents to mainly FrameMaker. We’re using plenty of templates, but we have yet to take the step to structured documents, and really using the power of FrameMaker for round trip XML publishing. Anyone taken the step? Experiences to share?

I’m also curious if anyone is using the DocBook DTD for their computing documentation?
docbook.org/index.html

We’d like to use a industry-standard DTD to make it easier for ODM customers to quickly reformat our product documentation to become theirs. (With their formatting). So we’re considering DocBook. :s

2

Hi,

I haven’t done book publishing for a while. At the time we were using Quark and Word.

I’m all for structured documents. I’m not sure what kind of content management systems are out there to keep track of all of this. I’d imagine that there could be good systems out there to manage documents. You could then use FrameMaker or anything to format them for output.

3

Until now I’ve been using Pagemaker and it SUCKS.

I’m currently working for another department (who is doing OEM work for a well known company) and they insisted that I use Framemaker. A lot harder to get your head round, but MUCH MUCH better.

Shame about the “one undo” thing though. :noway:

4

Once you have tons and tons of documents you’ll probably wish you had a real CMS that stored everything in SGML.

5

[quote=“gary”]Hi,
I’m all for structured documents. I’m not sure what kind of content management systems are out there to keep track of all of this. I’d imagine that there could be good systems out there to manage documents. You could then use FrameMaker or anything to format them for output.[/quote]

I know CoreMedia (coremedia.com) got a kick-ass CMS, and I know at least one large company here in Taipei is getting it implemented these days.

I think all companies with large amounts of product documentation need to move towards such systems, but it’s not easy. The content conversion is a big job, and it can also be a big work culture change.

I’m happy that we’re at least not using PageMaker and Word. Still some legacy documents around, but most are gone.