Editing and proofreading content with linters

A linter is a software utility that flags “suspicious usage” in software. Although linters are used by developers mostly to write more bug-free code, there are a few utilities emerging that work with documentation. They could be useful if you’re writing Web pages, markdown files or XML files. Write good checks for passive voice, repeated words, adverbs, weasel words,… Read more »

One to watch – Swagger2markup

Swagger2Markup promises to simplify the generation of REST API documentation by combining auto-generated API documentation produced by Swagger with manually written content. To include the programmatically generated snippets in your documentation, you’d use Asciidoc’s Include macro. The output would look like this:  

What capabilities do Technical Authors want in an authoring tool?

We were contacted last week by a SaaS developer who wanted to know if their solution might be of interest to companies needing to write and host their product’s user manual or online Help content. So what capabilities do Technical Authors look for in an authoring tool? There were a few features that sprung to mind: Multi-channel publishing (for… Read more »

Not so cool tools for Technical Authors – speech recognition software

Our method for creating online courses involves making an audio recording of the presenter, transcribing it, editing the script and then recording the final, video presentation. We’ve tried using speech recognition software to create the transcribed script, and it has been a deeply frustrating experience. While speech recognition is proving successful for searching and issuing… Read more »