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New Slack Channels – TC Dojo and Arbortext Users

Slack reminds us of the old IRC channels, if anyone out there remembers those. Liz was invited to Slack pretty early on but resisted using it because she said it was so isolated. In its earliest days, it was mostly browser-based, every space was separate, and you could only see…

Top Authors and Books from My 2017 Reading Challenge

After all the books I read in 2016, I’d planned on reading more non-fiction in 2017. As it turned out, we had a busy year here at Single-Sourcing Solutions and escapist reading was the order of the day. 2017 was the year of binge-reading and my grand total read was…

Is Arbortext DITA Pure DITA? YES!

Is Arbortext pure DITA?  Yes. Arbortext is pure DITA, pure XML. We are always surprised when we get this question because: Arbortext was the software IBM was using when they developed DITA. What does it mean to be “pure DITA”? DITA is an architecture and a method for writing, not a…

Techcomm magnets, buttons, and bookmarks

What’s your favorite giveaway? Mine is a backpack that I got at the very last Arbortext User Conference in 2005. This backpack had perfect balance and is great for bicyclists as well as pedestrians. Even though it’s 13 years old, it’s held up magnificently. I still use it. For years…

What training do I need to use Arbortext well?

Dear Liz I am starting to work with the PTC Arbortext Editor using SGML. I need to know if I can get training on the editor? What would it take to get the training to use it well? Would I need to buy the software? Please help! Wondering in Wichita…

Do you want to be a TC Dojo Master?

If you thought we didn’t pay attention to the survey results, we do. In fact, we have Eliot Kimber in March because someone in the TC Dojo asked for him. To be specific, they asked for him to talk about keys.After 6 years, 82 sessions, and more than 1770 votes, we’ve…

Problems upgrading your Arbortext Styler stylesheets from 6.1 to 7.0?

Quite by accident, we noticed that some stylesheets can have issues when upgrading to 7.0 from 6.1. A day or so ago, Liz was working with some stylesheets that hadn’t been touched since mid 2016 when she published her books. When she opened the stylesheet in 7.0 M080, Styler crashed…

Always be learning: Lessons for writing instructions

You can learn interesting things that apply directly to you…from a totally different discipline. Recently, I was reading a story about Board Game Designers. I may be a board game geek, but that’s not why the story was interesting. The story was more about UI/UX and things that technical writers…