It’s the end of the month, so it’s time for the technical writing digest! Here are articles and resources that I found interesting and helpful for me.

Calendar of Events

The KeyContent calendar of events is your source for upcoming conferences and events!

I gathered the technical writing conferences in my article called ‘Autumn Technical Writing Conferences’. Hurry up, autumn is coming, so buy a ticket in advanced.

Simplified graphics: Meet the new design style for technical communication

Tech communicators have a problem. Research shows images are a faster and more effective communication tool than words: the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text (Thermopylae 2014), and 67% of people understand information better when communicated visually (TechSmith 2018). This means it’s vital that, as communicators, we don’t rely on words alone to get our message across effectively.

Typesetting Markdown — Part 1: Build Script

Markdown is a document format designed to make writing documents easy. This series describes a way to typeset Markdown content using the powerful typesetting engine ConTeXt.

Separating document text (the written word) from its appearance (colours, fonts, and layout) makes it possible to create consistent corporate branding, ease documentation maintenance, simplify collaborative real-time editing, reliably embed machine-generated information, simultaneously publish multiple digital formats, and increase productivity.

You can find other articles of the series on the website.

SEO Tips for Technical Writers

Things like DevOps and Agile create more opportunities for cross-team collaboration. And, that’s what is required of any business now — smoother seamless product delivery. Technical writers are a huge part of this puzzle, and, finally, some real merge is happening due to technical documentation being available online.

The same rules apply to online docs as to any other form of written content on, say, your corporate website. Meaning that the SEO benefits documentation can bring should be taken seriously.

In this article, ClickHelp will share SEO tips and lifehacks to help you discover the full potential of online user manuals in this regard.

New topic in API course: Following agile scrum with documentation projects

Tom Johnson added a new article in his API doc course that expands the notion of docs as code to include not only tools but processes as well. He included an excerpt below and a link to the full article.

Introducing Markdown and Pandoc

Discover how to write manuscripts in Markdown and translate them with Pandoc into different output formats. You’ll use Markdown to annotate text formatting information with a strong focus on semantic information: you can annotate your text with information about where chapters and sections start, but not how chapter and heading captions should be formatted. As a result, you’ll decouple the structure of a text from how it is visualized and make it easier for you to produce different kinds of output. The same text can easily be formatted as HTML, PDF, or Word documents, with various visual styles, by tools that understand the markup annotations.

Share articles that you find helpful this month in the comment section!