If someone were writing a "welcome to technical writing" brochure, it wouldn't be one of those calm, peaceful, island getaway sort of adverts, complete with hula girls, tiki bars, and wide-angle views of endless beaches. Quite the contrary. It would be more like an ad for a 1950's B-movie -- Thrills, Chills, and Bizarre Adventures! "But I thought all you did was write?" a curious outsider might ask. We can all chuckle, shake our heads, and whisper mischievously, "Welcome to the funhouse!" Read more »

Two features separate technical writing tools from one another; one is reuse, and the other is conditional text. Strangely enough, no tools do both well. They are usually strong in one or the other, or worse, they are marginal in both.

Conditional text explicitly marks text sections to include when you publish to various formats; it's useful mostly for either highly-customized documents or for deliverables that have much in common, but a few minor variations (say if customer A got the same content as customer B plus a few notes about the degargalizer). Read more »