Tech Biz Writing

A few short years ago the materials and equipment of a technical writer would not have seemed out of place in the latter part of the 19th century. Today, much of that has been swept away by the all-devouring march of information technology. It’s hard to think of any function now that is not carried out using computerized equipment of one sort or another.

Whole swathes of earlier textbooks on the subject have had to be scrapped because of this. Irritating though this might be in one regard, in another — convenience — it’s a Godsend. Life is so much easier now for tech writers that they don’t have to worry about mountains of small, specialised items relating to their task and their’s alone. Almost every office is now equipped with the standard kit for every trade. Hot-desking is a real solution.

So, when it comes to describing the materials and equipment of a technical writer, there’s not that much to say beyond the contents of an average office. Paper sizes are now standard, and esoterica like “demy octavo” a thing of the past, except to the historically-minded.

Photocopying technology has moved on to digital printing/copying using fast laser techniques which are set to replace offset litho for most jobs in the very near future.

Microfilm is still around, especially in libraries, but is being rapidly replaced by CD ROMS and DVDs with “burn” capabilities.

As we discussed in the previous section, almost all technical artwork is now done on-screen, and for small-to-medium sized technical documentation a single cluster of IT hardware handles every task from draft to final copy, to design and artwork, to resource storage, to draft print, final output and binding. Such is the capacity of modern systems to embrace every task within the same box of tricks. All that’s needed to make it work is that even more exquisite unit of hardware/software: the technical writer in person.

The Technical Writer
Technical writing is rather a mixed bag of a career. The qualities required of a writer vary from literary proficiency of a basic sort to capabilities of man management. In between, there are the technical skills and a knowledge of many divergent disciplines. A writer usually requires some aptitude for general management, and also the elusive ability to prise information from reluctant sources: engineers, busy technicians or frantic designers behind on their schedules.

A technical writer may be pictured as the co-ordinating centre of a complex web of trades and profession. here we examine some of the peripheral aspects of the subject. It’s not possible to cover everything here, but prospective writers should get at least a glimpse of the kind of tasks they may be faced with. We begin with translations — points to look for when preparing technical material for a translator. We then examine the sometimes awkward topic of abstracting and abridging; awkward because it takes some skill to distil a larger document to a smaller one, without missing anything out. A brief consideration of indexing is included here, as also in the next module which deals with the editing of an index. This is followed by a section on the Development Documentation System (DDS), and a look at the documentation systems used for the maintenance of complex equipment. A discussion of Network Analysis concludes the section.

Next: 42. Translations.

Perspective is an artist’s attempt to come to terms with the world as it exists. To represent objects in space as they really are — or seem to be — on a flat plane (paper or screen), various expedients have to be employed. The essence of it is to project the three-dimensional object onto the two-dimensional surface in such a way that the apparent linear relationships of receding planes are maintained, or, in some cases, exaggerated. There are three types of linear perspective:

* One-point (parallel)
* Two-point (angular)
* Three-point (oblique)

For a cube the first would show one face only; the second would show two; and the third, three faces. Distortions would appear if a one-point drawing showed two faces; two-point showed three faces, and so on. Only three-point perspective allows a true depiction of three faces of an object. For this reason it’s usually used in technical illustration.

Photographs may also be used for line drawings as a guide for the illustrator. This is not as simple as it sounds since there are many problems associated with camera angle and obtaining the right axis or axes through the equipment. Photographic prints may be useful as a simple introductory guide for exploded views or cut-aways.

A further technique is to draw in the outlines and relevant details on a photographic plate with ink, and to bleach out the image with potassium ferricyanide leaving the line drawing intact. This is not frequently used in technical work nowadays, but it can be cheap and effective in certain circumstances.

Next: 39. Half-Tones

By the very nature of things a technical writer is rarely a competent illustrator. The converse is also true, but perhaps less so; some illustrators do engage in a cut-down form of technical writing when providing lengthy captions for their illustrations, or even writing a skeleton text linking their own artwork. Generally, however, the horses for courses principle applies and, in the course of producing a technical book, author will liaise closely with illustrator, and vice versa.

So the technical writer should understand the fundamental features of technical artwork, certainly to the point of being able to communicate in the terminology.

Here, we shall briefly consider the products of a technical illustrator: diagrams, line illustrations and half-tones. It should be borne in mind, however, that information technology has revolutionized the implementation side of illustration — the common use of scanners, and the ability to email illustrations as attachments, has all but made the old “paste-up” obsolescent, if not obsolete.

Similarly, producing artwork directly on-screen using CAD/CAM software or Paint/Draw programs is now almost universal. But the outcome for the reader, and the basic skills needed by the draughtsman, are essentially the same. If the student of this course is particularly interested in this aspect of illustration, a study of Microsoft Publisher, Quark, or page make-up programs is recommended. Here we shall merely define the object on the page, i.e. a circuit diagram, or flowchart.

Next: 37. Diagrams and Line Illustrations.

Modern technical books which are not generated in-house by newer techniques like digital printing, are usually printed by the offset-litho method. However, this system was not always the market leader, and it’s worth our while to have a quick look at some of the earlier processes, if only to gain an insight into the mystique of printing, which still accounts for many recruits into the publishing business.

Many printing methods have been invented over the eleven centuries since the Chinese produced the first printed book. All of them fall into one of three categories:

* Relief
* Intaglio
* Planographic

Relief printing as its name implies, depends on the face of each character or line protruding above the surface of a block into which it is cast or placed. Ink is applied to the face of the letter and adheres to the paper during contact. Letterpress, the oldest method of commercial printing, falls into this group. Originally, moveable type was taken from one of two cases: an upper case for capitals, and a lower case for the rest, and arranged by a compositor in a composing stick, after which the composed line–presented backwards–was transferred to a tray known as a galley.

Mechanization brought the Monotype machine, which cast single characters to order, and the Linotype machine, which cast a whole line of type from molten metal. The galleys were subsequently assembled into pages, a number which were locked up together in a frame called a chase, making up a forme, from which one side of a large sheet of paper forming a book section was printed.

The letterpress process was, and is, flexible and reliable, if laborious, and maintained its pre-eminence for five centuries until photographic developments allowed lithography to replace it. Anyone who has sweated over a letterpress book, hand-setting moveable type, and printing page by page, will thank modern computer technology and the almost effortless typesetting achieved with Word, WordPro, and their cognates.

Intaglio printing is the opposite of the relief method. Examples are gravure (line engraving) and photogravure (a photographic process using dots of varying size to form an image, and famously mentioned in the song Easter Parade). This system is still in use in its modern-day equivalent of inkjet printing.

William Blake, no less, invented an extraordinary technique for printing both text and illustration from one engraved plate. His method, though, was more relief than intaglio, because he literally painted on his words and pictures, and used an acid to cut away the rest of the copper plate to a depth of around 1/16th of an inch. By inking parts of the relief with different colours, he was able to achieve those near-miraculous effects that we so admire today. But, it should be said, his technique was so endlessly time-consuming that no technical writer should ever contemplate following his example!

In the two true ingalio variants, the characters themselves are cut, or etched, into the surface, rather than standing out above it. Low viscosity ink is applied to the surface so that the etched gullies are filled. The remaining ink is mopped up, or scraped away. When paper is applied to the printing plate, the ink in the gullies is lifted out by suction.

In the planographic process, the image is situated on the surface of the plate. The underlying principle is simplicity itself: grease repels water but retains ink. The characters are first impressed on the plate, usually by photographic means, and coated with a thin layer of grease. Water is washed over the surface, but is rejected by the greasy areas. On application of the ink, the grease on the image retains it, while the water over the rest of the plate repels it.

At the beginning of the 20th century, offset lithography was developed in Germany. This improved method involved transferring the matter to be printed from the plate by an intermediate cylinder to the paper.

Offset litho was at last a cheap, flexible method for printing large quantities of paper. And combined with the fact that the plates could be produced ever more quickly by chemical transfer, direct photography, or electrostatic processes, the scene was set for the technology’s ultimate dominance. It retains it to this day, although variations on the laser printing method: docuprinting or digital printing/copying, are set to replace it in short measure. Already it’s clear that some newspaper supplements are printed in this way, and the development of this process is probably unstoppable.

Somewhere between intaglio and planographic processes come silk-screen printing and the old wax-stencil duplicating (Roneo), where the ink is squeezed through a master from the back to the front onto a flat, or cylindrical, surface. Silk-screen printing can be used on a variety of surfaces from cloth to metal, producing a relatively high quality image. It is still used for T-shirt printing and in a range of art forms, usually of the cottage industry type.

Colour printing is effected by making a series of passes over the same paper, each in a different base colour which merge to give the finished effect. The combination of primary colours, if correctly aligned, gives a full chromatic image.

An author should have a basic understanding of these methods and the main areas in which each is involved. Again, modern digital printers are now the systems of choice in office environments and for many documentation situations. In others, the older technologies still hold sway — litho, especially. Lithography requires some attention throughout a print run to maintain quality, but is suitable mainly for long runs and has the edge over rivals in cost and speed. For short runs (up to 1000 copies of a booklet, for example) fast laser from a computer file, will probably be used.

Next: 36. Technical Illustrations.