Single-sourcing tool

[Sharon Burton]

FrameMaker and WebWorks Publisher. Does everything you need. Most Tech Comm
professionals know these tools so fining people who know them won't be hard.


sharon

Sharon Burton
CEO, Anthrobytes Consulting
951-369-8590
www.anthrobytes.com


-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+sharon=anthrobytes.com at lists.techwr-l.com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+sharon=anthrobytes.com at lists.techwr-l.com]On
Behalf Of elizabeth j allen
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 6:35 AM
To: techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: Single-sourcing tool


Oh mighty techwhirlers, hear my plea!

If you worked in a small department (2 tech writers) within a larger
company (16,000+ employees worldwide), and you were given the task of
recommending a tool to use, what would you recommend? But wait, there's
more! Here's the info you have to base your decision on:

     • The current tool for technical manuals is LaTeX
     • The group of two may grow to a group of 5 before the end of the year
     • The growth is driven by massive new products being developed
     • The level of documentation complexity is increasing exponentially
     • Long learning curves for tools are *not* a good thing (see "LaTeX")
     • Single-sourcing is *required*
     • LaTeX is used because it supports complicated conditionals like:
       \ifthenelse(A + (\not B + \not C))(true_statement)(false_statement)
     • The new tools need to support complicated conditionals
     • Your manager trusts your recommendation and needs it today
     • Whatever you recommend will be the tool you and your coworkers use
for these new massive doc projects. They'll blame you if it sucks.