STC TransAlpine Chapter

Over the past year, a small (but resilient) group of writers, translators and managers has been meeting at regular intervals at a downtown Basel restaurant.

There’s no set agenda: We discuss general topics, as well as STC and work-related issues.

If you’re interested in joining us, please leave a comment below and we’ll send you the meetup details.

Job Title: Technical Writer (M/W)
Job Ref: TW/FGR
Location: Les Ulis, France (30km from Paris)
Type: Permanent Contract
Closing date: 15 April 2008
URL: www.infovista.com
Contact name: Aurélie DURAND
Email: hr@infovista.com

To global providers and business users of IT, InfoVista is the Service-Centric Performance Management Software Company that assures the optimal delivery of business-critical telcos and IT services. InfoVista (www.infovista.com) is seeking for a highly talented Technical Writer for his French Headquarter (Les Ulis/30km from Paris).

DUTIES

The Technical Writer is the leader of the assigned project, from writing the specifications (Documentation Plan) to delivering the validated manuals. This includes:

• Analyzing the product structure to determine the corresponding sections to include in the documentation.
• Gathering the technical input and analyzing information supplied by PSDO partners (Developers, QA and PM). Defining the appropriate level of details to supply based on the targeted audience.
• Selecting or specifying the required illustrations that enhance and simplify the text.
• Writing the manuals according to corporate templates. The information presented must be clear, concise and understandable to users who are not native English speakers.
• Submitting the manuals for validation (QA and PM) and implementing the necessary corrections.
• Wrapping up the project. This includes the final documentation delivery, storage in the documentation archive and sign off with the Product Manager.

The Technical Writer is involved in the product development cycle. As such, he/she works closely with other departments to:

• Write the Documentation plan that describes the required deliverables (manual types, online help, movies, etc.), their objectives, the targeted audience, etc. The contents of the manuals are defined in conjunction with the Product Manager.
• Set the project tasks according to the plan to give an overview of the project calendar, constraints and interaction with other departments.
• Report any issue & risk that may impact the project advancement and propose possible alternatives to help the decision process.

The Technical Writer is part of Documentation team.

This means proposing alternatives and solutions to develop best practices and improve cross-project methods on a continual basis. By participating to the team effort, the technical writer helps in raising the overall department expertise and recognition. 

PROFIL

The successful candidate will at least:

• Demonstrates the ability to interview the information providers (e.g. R&D and PM). The Tech. Writer adopts the end-user role in operational situations to identify tasks necessary to describe in the documentation.
• Has a good working knowledge of desktop publication tools, including Adobe FrameMaker, Acrobat and MS Word. He/she has a basic knowledge of online help authoring tools.
• Knows how to present didactical information using methods such as Information Mapping and Text Structure Analysis.
• Has the ability to master InfoVista technology in particular, and networking / telecom technology in general.  

The Amsterdam LIG examines Isotypes in Utrecht

On a recent Saturday, the Amsterdam LIG went to an exhibit at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht that was part of a series of events celebrating the second biennial for social design (www.utrechtmanifest.nl). The exhibit was in two parts. One part was Lovely Language: Words divide, images unite, about the Isotype pictogram series created early in the 20th century by the Austrian educator and philosopher Otto Neurath in cooperation with the German graphic artist Gerd Arntz. The second part was A Safe Place: Pictograms for disaster areas, a series of image-signs to help populations in disastrous situations. Of course, technical communicators do this kind of work all the time; try to make concepts transparently and instantly recognizable. We often use simple pictures to make things clear. Across the exhibit we were struck by the sense of the grammar and syntax of pictograms, and the need for localisation. A picture says a thousand words, but those words might be different to a person in a culture removed from our own.

Want to meet up with us somewhere in The Netherlands? Contact Alice Jane Emanuel at alicejanee@commatheory.com Want to meet Alice Jane at an event near you? Alice Jane will be at: London conference on 1 March 2008 (STC UK), Paris conference on 14 March 2008 (STC France), and Lubljana conference 16-18 April 2008 (STC TAC). See you there!

Mahesh Gupta, Adobe’s FrameMaker Product Manager announced the availability of the Version 8.0.2 update in a post on the Technical Communication blog.

This patch (8.0p273) must be applied on top of 8.0.1 (8.0p266) only.

The update covers a series of minor bugs and annoyances, including several related to Unicode characters and XML roundtripping and the status bar shortcuts (Ctrl+F8, Ctrl+F9) for the paragraph and character catalogs (see the post for the full list).

The update is available via the Adobe Update Manager (Help > Updates), and should show up on the FrameMaker Downloads page sometime soon.