Our chapter meetings may not be SRO, but we still provide a service to the North Bay technical documentation community — and we invite your participation in chapter roles. As long as you are an STC member and are able to attend regular chapter meetings (you do not need to be a NorthBay Chapter member), please contact president@stc-northbay.org from now through the last day of November if you would like to take on the role of president, vice president, treasurer, or web master.
STC Sacramento is presenting the following workshop: Saturday October 22, 2011 9 AM to 5 PM Topic-based authoring is a technique for writing content as discrete, stand-alone pieces (“topics”) that can be combined and reused in different ways. The topic-based approach has been getting a lot of attention recently because it is an integral part …
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From Richard Mateosian, indefatigable leader of Touchstone: Touchstone 2011-12 Call for Entries This year’s Touchstone technical communication competition is almost upon us. The deadline for entries is Saturday, October 1, 2011. Entry forms and detailed entry instructions are at www.stc-touchstone.org/Submit.html. If you have work you’re especially proud of, enter it so your fellow communicators can …
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Scott Prentice, chapter webmeister, president of Leximation, and all-around FrameMaker guru, brought us up to date regarding the latest developments in electronic book publication standards. With the current proliferation of portable Internet devices, the savvy tech doc specialist may want to be aware of the issues involved in converting source documents to those that are …
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Andrew Davis, formerly principal of Synergistech Communications and now a recruiter for Content Rules (formerly Oak Hill Corporation), provided valuable insights (both live and remotely) at our March 2011 meeting. A true champion of the candidate, he reads a lot of job descriptions and resumes, and made clear that a great portfolio (and approach) is …
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Joe Welinske has been a technical writer since 1984, and one of his first documents was a comic book. In four colors. For plumbers. To put in a hip pocket. Why make plumbers carry around a standard size tech doc to tell them how fit pipe when something much smaller would do? The manual was …
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Join us to relax with fellow communicators, enjoy a buffet dinner, and celebrate excellence in the profession. Every year Touchstone, the Northern California Technical Communication Competition, receives many fine entries. We send the best ones to the STC International Summit Awards competitions. We will announce this year’s winners and display their entries throughout the evening. …
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At our last meeting, Scott Prentice, chapter webmaster and president of Leximation, Inc., presented a concise summary of the motivations and issues involved in using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture to produce PDFs. Why use DITA at all? By using XML to author in a topic-oriented structure, DITA lets you rearrange topics and reuse them …
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We in the technical documentation community are skilled writers and speakers. True. And we never need to revisit basic principles, and never ever get contentious over language. Not so true. This makes life fun. At our August 2010 meeting, Arlene Miller, author of The Best Little Grammar Book Ever!, came with a short list of …
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In this online-only event, Mike Ziegenhagen shared his growing expertise–and most of all his enthusiasm–ror the expanding sector of virtual world applications. Many are by now aware of Second Life, but Mike documented an application from Forterra Systems called OLIVE ™, an “online interactive virtual environment” that offers the security sorely lacking in the standard, …
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