Hello all: I’m a complete newbie to the world of Technical Writing. I’ve been reading as much about the subject on the Web as I can, literally day and night, and I’ve purchased a couple of TW books. I’m taking a TW class at a local university in the spring. Although my present job with the Feds doesn’t involve TW, I do a lot of in-house writing, and I have a strong technical background – an MS in Information Systems, and about 13 years of LAN and PC configuration and troubleshooting, as well as end-user instruction. The administrivia in my job can be a real pain, but I enjoy the times I get to deal with technology issues.
I’ve been told by an experienced TW that getting involved in an Open Source community is the best way to get one’s feet wet, so here I am. I just installed OO yesterday, and I’m playing with it to get some familiarity with its features. I’ve looked through the Documentation Task list, and I’ve read the “Contributing to the Documentation Project” page. Frankly, I sort of feel like I'm looking up from the bottom of a long, steep hill. Can someone brand new to both TW and OO make a useful contribution? Furthermore, what further skills do I need to acquire to be a successful TW? I did do a fair amount of programming (Pascal, Object PAL) when I was in school, but I'm certainly not a developer. I have zilch experience writing online help, and from what I've seen, the Help editors tend to be pretty expensive. Is that an expense I'll eventually just have to bear? I've done a few simple web pages, enough to where I'm comfortable with basic HTML. What about XML? Questions, questions. Tony Turley --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
