Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
December 2005/January 2006
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2005/January 2006 |
The January meeting is on Wednesday, January 18, 2006, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
AuthorIT is the most significant technical communication tools to take hold in recent years. AuthorIT is an authoring environment and single source content management tool that can be used for the following:
Widely adopted and used in Fortune 500 companies, AuthorIT provides many benefits and a few challenges to those who make the switch. Hear some of these first-hand from two senior technical writers, Chris Muntzer and Rolfe Dlugy-Hegwer, who were responsible for bringing AuthorIT to their organizations in the past 12 months. Come and gain insights for learning and using this tool.
Chris grew up in London, England, and, after training as an electrical engineer, gained his BSC EE from Brunel University. As he enjoyed both travel and a challenge, he took a job with an oil field service company, designing data acquisition systems for use on remote drilling locations throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Good documentation of those systems was much appreciated by the folks who operated and serviced the equipment.
Little by little the technical communication content of his work increased to where he now does it full-time. His interest in object oriented programming became a good fit for the implementation of AuthorIT as a single source documentation tool. At present, he is using a single library of AuthorIT to produce documents for a family of test and measurement instruments. The single source provides output formats for mobile instruments, PCs, and hard copy.
In a surprising way, he is as happy and challenged creating multiple publications in multiple languages as he was working at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the Ivory Coast, or Libya in Africa.
Rolfe is a Senior Technical Writer at Symmetricom's Timing, Test, & Measurement division. He has served the STC North Bay chapter for over three years as President and Vice President, and is currently the chapter's E-Media Manager. In addition to technical writing and videography, Rolfe is passionate about exploring Northern California's rivers, estuaries, and bays by paddle. His essays, articles, and photographs are available at www.baynorth.com.
Copyright © 2005 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication under the provisions of the chapter's copyright policy.