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Lost in translation (and in my brain)
Thursday, July 23, 2009 — posted by Alan Pringle
Last night, a bit of spam managed to worm its way through the filters on a personal email account, and I have to admit I glanced at the content while scanning previews of messages. That's when I spotted a paragraph that really jumped out at me:They have good management systems, product quality inspection system. And international speedboat (EMS) is the door - door accurate! Soon!
My thought process was, What's up with the international speedboats? And why are emergency medical services (EMS) using these speedboats? I knew that the person who wrote the content was likely not a native English speaker, but I could not figure out what the writer was trying to communicate.
This morning, I finally realized what the message was trying to say: the company uses EMS worldwide delivery services for prompt and accurate delivery to my door. My brain must not have been firing on all cylinders last night when I thought EMS meant "emergency medical services."
I don't think I've ever spent as much time thinking about a company's marketing message, but my thoughts weren't about using the company's services--I was merely trying to comprehend the message itself. That's not what the company intended, I'm sure.
Marketing for a global audience--particularly one that associates EMS with "emergency medical services"--is not an easy thing!
Labels: humor, localization
9:28 AM Permalink | |
Error message melodrama
Monday, July 20, 2009 — posted by Alan Pringle
The Shanghai Tech Writer blog has posted a screen capture of a rather ominous error message in FrameMaker:The licensing subsystem has failed catastrophically. You must reinstall or call customer support.I have never been the unfortunate recipient of that particular message in the many years I've worked with FrameMaker. If I did encounter that message, I would fully expect it to be accompanied by the shrieking strings from the Psycho shower scene. The use of "catastrophically" is a bit over the top. The fact I need to reinstall or contact customer support sets the tone enough, thank you very much--no soundtrack or scary adverb required.
The editor in me wants "catastrophically" removed from that message. If that bit of text came across my desk for review, I would have pushed back hard on the use of that word. It's bad enough the user has to get a solution to the error, and referring to the problem as "catastrophic" is certainly not doing the user any favors.
Labels: FrameMaker, humor, technical writing
2:38 PM Permalink | |
More cowbell!
Thursday, June 04, 2009 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
About a year ago, we added Google Analytics to our web site. I have done some research to see what posts were the most popular in the past year:- The clear winner was our FrameMaker 9 review. With 21 comments, I think it was also the most heavily commented post. Interestingly, the post itself is little more than a pointer to the PDF file that contains the actual review.
- InDesign CS4 = Hannibal post, which discussed InDesign's encroachment on traditional FrameMaker features.
- A surprise...a post from 2006 in which Mark Baker discussed the merits (or lack thereof) of DITA in To DITA or not to DITA
We noticed this pattern recently, when a carefully crafted, meticulously written post was ignored in favor of a throwaway post dashed off in minutes with a catchy title (Death to Recipes!).
For useful, thoughtful advice on blogging, I refer you to Tom Johnson and Rich Maggiani. I, however, have a new set of blogging recommendations:
- Write catchy titles
- Have an opinion, preferably an outrageous one
- More cowbell
Labels: blogs, cowbell, humor, web 2.0
8:00 AM Permalink | |
WMF...that'll shut 'em up
Friday, February 20, 2009 — posted by Terry Smith
Which graphics formats should you use in your documentation? For print, the traditional advice is EPS for line drawings and TIFF for screen captures and photographs. That's still good advice. These days, you might choose PDF and PNG for the same purposes. There are caveats for each of these formats, but in general, these are excellent choices.Of course, everybody knows to stay away from WMF, the Windows Metafile Format. WMF doesn't handle gradients, can't have more than 256 colors, and refuses to play nice with anything other than Windows.
Think you're too good to hang out with WMF? For your print and online documentation, perhaps. But it may be a great choice to give to your company's PowerPoint users.
Are you familiar with this scenario? PowerPoint User saw some graphics in your documentation and thought they would work for some sales presentations. The screen captures are easy; you just give PowerPoint User PNGs or BMPs or whatever. It's the line drawings that are the problem. PowerPoint User doesn't have Illustrator and has never heard of EPS. PowerPoint User says, "Can you give me a copy of those pictures in a format that I can use in PowerPoint? Oh, and can make that box purple and change that font for me first? And move that line just a little bit? And make that line thicker? And remove that entire right side of the picture and split it into two pictures?"
You want PowerPoint User to reuse the graphics; you're all about reuse. But you have dealt with PowerPoint User before, and you know you will never get your real job done if you get pulled into the sucking vortex of PowerPoint User's endless requests.
The secret is to give PowerPoint User the graphics in a format that can be edited from within PowerPoint (or Word): WMF. Here's the drill that will make you a hero:
- Save your graphics as WMF.
- Place each WMF on a separate page in a PowerPoint or Word file.
- Tell PowerPoint User to double-click on a graphic to make it editable.
(If you think your PowerPoint User is really dumb, you can double-click the graphic and respond to the dialog box asking if you want to make the drawing editable yourself before saving the file, but nobody is that dumb.)
Labels: graphics WMF, humor
8:00 AM Permalink | |
A technical writing ditty
Thursday, October 23, 2008 — posted by Alan Pringle
I'm constantly amazed by what you can find on YouTube, and this clip from a clever tech writer is no exception:Labels: humor, technical writing
9:21 AM Permalink | |
Know your audience, political edition
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
Dear Sarah Palin,Your campaign schedule looks brutal. And since you're not flying commercial carriers, you don't even get frequent flyer miles. It's truly tragic.
Thank you for your personal letter. I have a few tips for you from the technical communication industry that should help you with future fund-raising attempts.
- Know your audience. I'm not sure where you got my name and address, but a quick cross-reference against the registered voter database would have told you that I'm registered as a Democrat. Based on that, you might want to modify "the fearful rhetoric of the Obama-Biden Democrats" to something a little less, you know, guaranteed to annoy me.
- Pruf your work. Really.
- Get my name right. "Sarah O. Keefe" does not fill me with warm fuzzies.
Your truly,
Sarah O'Keefe
PS Enjoyed your appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Labels: humor, technical writing
10:57 AM Permalink | |
A Day in the Life....
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 — posted by Sheila Loring
Here's an inside peak at a day in the life of a Scriptorium employee:http://xkcd.com/208/
But wait, there's more...a t-shirt!
http://store.xkcd.com/
Ladies, check out the regular expression skirt, too. The code is printed upside down for easy reading while sitting.
Labels: humor, regular expressions
1:30 PM Permalink | |
Can this relationship be saved?
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 — posted by Terry Smith
For 15 years, I was a lovesick FrameMaker groupie. Ask anybody. As a founding member of the North Carolina FrameMaker Users Network (NC-FUN), I went to meetings regularly for ten years to talk about everything FrameMaker: plug-ins, database connectivity, scripting, single-sourcing, structure, obscure features, you name it. I couldn't get enough. FrameMaker was the great desktop publishing love of my life. When I joined Scriptorium Publishing earlier this year, I was given the task of updating Publishing Essentials: Unstructured FrameMaker 8. Yes! FrameMaker and I were inseparable.But then FrameMaker 8 absolutely refused to produce an acceptable PDF file.
Whatever anybody might say about FrameMaker, one thing was always true: FrameMaker produced top-of-the-line PDF files. If you needed good PDF files, you included FrameMaker in your workflow. Now, PDF files produced from FrameMaker were a mess. Sure, some PDF problems had cropped up with earlier versions (and what relationship doesn't have a few PDF problems?), but it was worse now. Much worse. Undeterred, I tried a lot of things. I found some workarounds, but the problem was never really fixed. I could get text and high-quality pictures or I could have hypertext links, but not both. I felt angry and betrayed.
Pfft. Why not dump FrameMaker completely and just move my content to a dedicated XML editor? After all, XSL-FO could also give me a lot of trouble followed by lousy PDF output. I was this close to telling FrameMaker to hit the bricks.
Then Microsoft released a hotfix that patches the problems with Windows that are apparently the root of FrameMaker's PDF problems. So it's not all FrameMaker's fault after all. I applied the hotfix and FrameMaker is back in the house...
...but sleeping on the couch. I'm still miffed about the new conditional expressions. That's a post for another day.
You have to request the hotfix to get it: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=952909.
Labels: cranky, FrameMaker, humor
2:34 PM Permalink | |
How to beat me at Scrabble
Thursday, February 14, 2008 — posted by Sarah
I'm a pretty decent Scrabble player, although not as good as some of my friends (I'm looking at you, Char).But with these tiles, I'd be worthless.
(h/t Dictionary Evangelist)
Labels: humor
7:32 PM Permalink | |
DocTrain: Keynote from David Platt
Thursday, October 18, 2007 — posted by Sarah
I'm at DocTrain East in Boston this week.We're starting out with a keynote from David Platt, author of Why Software Sucks...and what you can do about it.
Internet users in 1994 were almost exclusively academics/researchers; about 2 million total. Lots of technical support; no deadlines.
In 2006, we have 1 billion WWW users and almost all of them are using personal computers. New computer users and no support.
Platt's First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design:
Know Thy User for He is Not Thee72% of adult population doesn't have a college degree, but of course software is developed almost exclusively by people with college degrees.
"Normal people don't drive stick shifts". But a lot of programmers prefer them -- inconvenient but more control. Software developers like the process of driving the car; normal people prefer to just get there.
Software applications tend to sacrifice ease of use (which developers don't care about) for fine-grained control (which developers do care about but users don't).
Users just want the software to work.
Interfaces matter -- the example is ups.com, which is pain to navigate. However, you can drop a UPS tracking number into a Google toolbar and get the tracking information in one click. Thus, Google is a better UPS tracker than ups.com.
Constant friction -- extra clicks cost money because they take time.
Catastrophic error -- Mars Orbiter, medical errors...
Personal public ridicule -- People publish lists like "web pages that suck"
Five ways to make a project suck less:
1. Add [a person who does not know the internal workings of the software] to the design team. I think he might have lost some of the audience when he said that tech writers would be ideal for this.
2. Break convention when needed (Quicken/MS Money never offer to save your content; they just do it.)
3. Don't let edge cases complicate the mainstream
4. Instrument -- carefully. Use feedback agents to get information about how software is being used.
5. Always ask: is this design decision taking us closer to "just working" or farther away?
Entertaining, but he's used to presenting to nearly all-male, all-programmer audiences, and much of what he's doing here was preaching to the choir.
Labels: conferences, doctraineast07, humor
7:56 AM Permalink | |
I'm going to make this mandatory
Thursday, July 26, 2007 — posted by Sarah
Our new, corporate-wide logo.
Sheila had this on her bulletin board, and it made me laugh.
In late June, our local paper ran an article entitled Don't Outdress the Boss.
In our office, that it really difficult. What fashion combination is a notch below my general summer uniform -- a T shirt, capris, and flip flops? Swimsuit and coverup? Running shorts? A painting smock?
(For the record, I usually dress like an adult when meeting with customers or at conferences. Mostly.)
Labels: humor
10:27 AM Permalink | |