Foul Writer’s World

Work has been a nightmare recently, hence why the updates have been scarce as of late.

I am currently migrating our existing help documentation into Flare. This would normally be an easy task, except that the help documentation I’m migrating was written in HTML that is so badly malformed that I’m surprised a web browser can even show the pages. The help was also generated a few versions ago, and it is easy to see it was written by a developer rather than a technical writer as it is difficult to read and task/ procedures lists are often nested up to four times. The text content also seems to have been placed in a table to apply some sort of layout design. So importing this content to Flare is pointless. Flare usually does a good job of converting what it can, but with these help files it just falls over flat. Because of this I have resulted to saving what I can from the existing help by copying and pasting into Flare what I can and then rewriting what I deem as unfit.

I found an interesting post by Kathy Lawrence that I wish whoever wrote the original help documentation had read through.

Technical Writing in Ten Easy Steps

Other related information

• News in Brief: W/E 14th June 2009
• Flare 4 out of the bag
• More Flare for all
• Flare release imminent?
• MadCap release Blaze preview
• Building a multi-lingual help system
• Usability mistakes
• DITA coming to an application near you!
• Working towards a different future for my technical communications
• The tools I use