Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
October/November 2007
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter October/November 2007 |
The October meeting is on Wednesday, October 17, 2007, 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.
API Documentation is a fast-growing and highly-paid specialty in technical writing. As Monique Semp explains, you can write an API Reference in FrameMaker and publish it as a PDF, but such a document is difficult to maintain and unlikely to satisfy your target audience: programmers. Programmers expect online, hyperlinked reference material that's exactly in sync with the API elements (such as classes and functions).
This presentation shows how to use automated tools to generate an HTML-formatted API reference. Monique will give us an overview of automating an API reference's production and tell us the advantages of such an approach over a manual solution such as FrameMaker-to-PDF. She will give us guidelines for choosing the right tool, and discuss concerns such as imposing coding standards and workflow changes on the engineers. She will demonstrate how this all worked when, using DoxyS, she developed an API Reference for a 700+ function ANSI C API.
A senior STC member, with more than 15 years of documentation and software experience, Monique has won STC Touchstone and Berkeley competition awards of merit and excellence every year since 2001.
Monique began her career as a software engineer writing PL/M and C code for automated train control (the "people movers" in airports) and the accompanying user manuals. Her career evolved and she's been a technical writer since 2001; her first project was producing API documentation for Java-based wireless applications.
Monique has her own company, Write Quick, Inc., and provides many technical writing services, including API references, programming guides, configuration manuals, and technical processes and procedures.