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Alan T Litchfield | 1 Jun 2004 05:36
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Re: InfoD-Cafe: Re: Documentation and implementation


On 01/06/2004, at 1:24 AM, Jim Curran wrote:

> Alan T Litchfield wrote:
>
>> Question, though. What is the critical mass required to inspire
>> sufficient confidence in writers of documentation so that they will
>> take the risk of writing well constructed, detailed and accurate
>> documentation?
>
> My first thought is - how many are capable of it? Impressive technical 
> writers are few and far between.
>
> In organizations, moreover, the work of technical writers is often 
> misunderstood and not highly valued. The writers will be motivated to 
> work quickly rather than accurately.
>
> So to me it's not so much the idea of confidence being inspired in the 
> writers as in the people who determine organizational priorities and 
> spending.
>
> It wouldn't be hard to attract the best technical writers to 
> organizations that favor turning out well-constructed, detailed, and 
> accurate documentation, and are willing to spend the money and take 
> the time necessary.
>

Yes of course, you are right. Most writers I have known didn't work on 
software development documentation and so their work would have been 
more highly valued because of the industries they were in (airlines,
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Conrad Taylor | 1 Jun 2004 07:02
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Re: InfoD-Cafe: Documentation and implementation

Mick McAllister wrote:

>    Most Japanese are too polite to tell us, but the reason
>    they don't use native English translators to localize
>    into English is that no English speaker could possibly
>    understand Japanese well enough to translate it...

I suspect that it is not only Anglo world-views that need to be
examined with healthy scepticism.  My understanding is that the
the curriculum in Japanese education, especially in history,
builds a picture of the uniqueness and superiority of Japanese
culture which effectively ignores what they absorbed from China.
(As for what Japan absorbed from the despised Koreans in the
middle ages, that is even more hidden.)

My sister in law recently moved on from a long, successful but
somewhat exhausting career as one of Thailand's leading Japanese-
to-Thai translators. Much of her work was with extremely idiomatic
Japanese (dubbing scripts for Japanese cartoons and movies to be
broadcast in Thai).  Never any suggestion there that a native
Japanese speaker should have the temerity to translate into Thai.
There are good reasons for the translation industry practice of
preferring that translators work *into* their own language,
rather than *out of* it.

Curtis wrote:

>    Before you draw too many conclusions about Americans
>    from our President, keep in mind that a majority of us
>    voted for the other guy.
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Conrad Taylor | 1 Jun 2004 07:35
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Re: InfoD-Cafe: Useful resource

Jane told me on the phone yesterday about the FF Call fonts
for phone displays.  Seems to me they could also be useful
for certain genres of magazine and advertising or health-
promotion literature, for example those directed towards
young people.

The idea of writing short accolades about software tools and
other resources which we find useful in our work is a promising
one.  If other people want to write similar short reviews, I
could collect them up and maybe we can find space for them on
the informationdesign.org Web site.

I suggest that if other want to follow Jane's lead, we stick
to her Subject title e.g. "InfoD-Cafe: Useful resource" or
"Re: InfoD-Cafe: Useful resource".

- - - - - - -

My candidate is "CopyPaste", a utility for Macintosh and Windows
which replaces the single copy/paste universal clipboard facility
with one that offers ten clipboards.  For example use [Command-C-5]
to copy to clipboard 5, and [Command-V-5] to paste from it. Useful
e.g. in handling email correspondence or coding Web pages, which
often requires repetitive copy and paste from several sources.

All versions of CopyPaste also include a Clipboard Recorder which
records a hundred or more of the most recent copy-and-paste
operations in a palette, from which you can then paste a previous
copied object with a single click.
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Tori | 1 Jun 2004 09:15
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Re: InfoD-Cafe: Hyphenation of Dual-Purpose Words

Conrad wrote:
> Actually, this seems to me to be another area of practice where
> Yanks and Limeys disagree.  When my first major article for the
> Seybold Report was published, and I was sent the page proofs,
> I found that the word "photographer" had been split as "photog-
> rapher", and I challenged this as absurd; only to be informed
> by Steve Edwards, the editor, that this was the "correct" place
> to hyphenate the word according to American practice.

I find it hard to believe that even an American would accept photog-rapher
as correct. My second grade teacher (an American, as I am too) taught us
better than that. It is true that we hyphenate according to physical breaks,
but no American I know separates the sound of g and r in "gr."

Tori
(period inside quotes: the sure sign of an American)

On 05/31/2004 12:20, "Conrad Taylor" <conrad <at> ideograf.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Jane wrote:
> 
>>    Anyone who thinks that proj-ect is acceptable, for either the verb or
>>    the noun, is not worthy of the designation 'professional lexicographer'.
>>    It's from the Latin 'projicere (projectum)', a compound of 'pro',
>>    forth, and 'jacere', to throw. Lexicography is all about knowing
>>    things like that.
> 
> Actually, this seems to me to be another area of practice where
> Yanks and Limeys disagree.  When my first major article for the
> Seybold Report was published, and I was sent the page proofs,
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Matt Carey | 1 Jun 2004 11:33
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Re: InfoD-Cafe: Bitten on the bum!


On 29 May 2004, at 3:26 pm, Mick McAllister wrote:

>
> I've been "using" Office XP at work (I quit upgrading at home w/Word 
> 97), and it is so badly documented and so utterly unwilling to do what 
> I WANT it to do (like, for example, let me change the #&$^#^# styles 
> permanently and stop dumping 300% MS Trash into exported HTML, even 
> with the "Filtering"--what a joke--turned on) that I truly want to put 
> my fist through the screen sometimes. I can work faster in non-WYSIWYG 
> Homesite than I can in Microsoft's "Our way or go f**k yourself" 
> world. I spend 50-80% of my document time ripping out the  MSXML (They 
> actually have a proprietary XML competitor they had the nerve to 
> suggest to the Mozilla guys that they should support. The public 
> response was a resounding raspberry. Go guys), like the mysterious 
> <o:p> markers and the random bidi styles added to, say, <b> commands 
> (but no other kind of text). Why do I bother?. Because my client is 
> dealing with users who don't have a T-1 line at their disposal to 
> download a 400K, one-page file. MS advocates are the SUV drivers of 
> computing, happily unaware that lots of their fellow humans can't 
> afford a gas-guzzling behemoth and don't want one if they could.
>

it seems we all have 'hair-tearing' experiences of this type with m$ 
products!

i'm currently trying to deal with what i thought would be very simple 
to fix, but i should have known better really ;\

i have built an intranet for one of my clients and they all use m$
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Mick McAllister | 1 Jun 2004 15:53

Re: InfoD-Cafe: Documentation and implementation

At 06:02 AM 6/1/2004 +0100, you wrote:
>Mick McAllister wrote:
>
>>    Most Japanese are too polite to tell us, but the reason
>>    they don't use native English translators to localize
>>    into English is that no English speaker could possibly
>>    understand Japanese well enough to translate it...
>I suspect that it is not only Anglo world-views that need to be
>examined with healthy scepticism.
One of the saddest manifestations of liberalism is the view that we are 
unique in our faults. I have been a lover of things Japanese since I was a 
teen, but I harbor no illusions about their "perfection."

Mick

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Mick McAllister | 1 Jun 2004 15:55

Re: InfoD-Cafe: Hyphenation of Dual-Purpose Words


>I find it hard to believe that even an American would accept photog-rapher
>as correct.
Thank you for sanity. I've been an American writer all my life and a 
writing teacher, and editor all my adult life, and photog-rapher is some 
new madness I've never seen before.

M

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Mick McAllister | 1 Jun 2004 15:47

Re: InfoD-Cafe: Documentation and implementation

At 11:36 AM 5/31/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>on 2004-05-31 06:30 Mick McAllister wrote:
>>The fact is, Americans are contemptuous of language skills (witness the 
>>witless President).
>
>Before you draw too many conclusions about Americans from our President, 
>keep in mind that a majority of us voted for the other guy.
>
>--
>Curtis Clark
:-) Me too. But my point remains. We don't care that he's hopelessly and 
demonstrably stupid and inarticulate. In fact, caring is regarded as 
elitist. Sad.
M

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Mick McAllister | 1 Jun 2004 15:50

Re: InfoD-Cafe: Re: Documentation and implementation


>On the other hand, perhaps there is a business case for a company to whom 
>document challenged development companies can turn,
There are such companies. I can name four, all of them very respectable and 
highly thought of in the STC. The "desperate" companies prefer to have 
their documentation produced by $1/hour folks offshore. I know, I've had to 
oversee translating the "English" they produce into facsimiles of other 
languages.

This in itself, the struggle of tech writing firms with solid reputations 
to simply stay afloat, simply enforces my point. They are regarded as 
frosting. Nice to be able to spurge on frosting....

Mick

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Mick McAllister | 1 Jun 2004 16:04

Re: InfoD-Cafe: Bitten on the bum!


>when they save the page they have edited, the css is ignored because there 
>are now hundreds of word c**p styles in there.
Precisely. It is maddening because a basic principle of DTP is that you do 
NOT format on the character level unless you have to. Word is precisely the 
opposite, and always has been. Form and content are run together like a 
steak dinner in a blender. I used to export to RTF and clean that up. I 
tried that with one of these WordXp files. A 200K document with no 
graphics. It created a 2.3 MEG RTF.

Without a doubt the single most maddening phenomenon in all this is the 
fact the FrontPage, nominally an HTML editor, routinely screws up well-made 
HTML when it saves files created elsewhere and then "touched" in FP. At 
first I thought I was imagining this. I'm not. It adds cell widths in the 
places where I "forgot" them (because they were redundant), moves bolds, 
etc. to enclose following spaces, and adds deprecated Font settings to 
cover the places where I foolishly failed to set the font surrounding a 
graphic.

Enough. I can feel the blood pressure responding....
M

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Gmane