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Subject:Re: The Writer's Kit From:Andrew Plato <aplato -at- EASYSTREET -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 5 Jan 1998 11:54:39 -0800
Would you hire a plumber who only used a snake -- even to fix leaky sinks?
Would you hire an electrician who insisted on using only 220 volt wiring
(even for puny 12 volt things).
Would you hire a auto mechanic who only will work with a metric socket set
(and you have an American car)?
No, so why would you want tech writers that don't have or know all the
tools? I mean the big stuff like Word, PageMaker, and FrameMaker. Nobody
cares if you don't know EsotericMaker version 9.3-B for UNIX or something
equally obscure. But the big stuff - you should know it, use it, and deal
with it.
Professionals are not influenced by tool and technology holy wars.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Andrew Plato
Owner / Principal Consultant
Anitian Technology Services
www.anitian.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>Recently I got some gentle jibing from a client who insisted that I
"should"
>have Pagemaker since I was a technical writer. My own opinion was that
>Pagemaker was a desktop publishing tool and not a writing tool per se, and
it
>certainly wasn't reasonable to just expect that I would have it (I had in
fact
>explicitly said I didn't during our first meeting.) Nor that writing
services
>would necessarily include printer-ready layout.
>
>My question: what do members of this list consider basic components of a
>freelance TW's kit - i.e., what's a 'must', what's a 'should' and what's a
>'nice to have'? I'm thinking both hardware and software here. (I've
checked
>the archive and we've knocked around lots of closely related ideas, but
not,
>so far as I can find, this one in particular.)
>
>To put it another way, what should a client expect a freelancer will
>reasonably have available as a matter of course?
>
>Also, how much has desktop publishing implicitly become part of our job
>description? Word has aspects of DTP, but my Word files have been sent
>elsewhere for pre-press work. Whereas this most recent client expects it
all
>as part of TW work.
>
>Comments?
>
>Jim Chevallier
>Los Angeles
>=========================================================
>Visit Chez Jim: Jim Chevallier's Home Page - http://www.gis.net/~jimcheval
>=========================================================
>
>
>
