The Society for Technical Communication is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators - anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.

The STC Toronto Chapter was founded in 1959 (then the Society of Technical Writers) and is the largest chapter in Canada.

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The Wandering Eye
A Technical Writer's Toolkit: Some Favourites
by Keith Soltys

We all use web browsers, so why not use the best? During the last year, Mozilla Firefox has taken a large bite of out Internet Explorer's market share, and it's no wonder why. Firefox is lean, fast, and secure, and like IE, it's free. Unlike IE, it doesn't roll over for every piece of software that wants to install on your PC. And it has many useful features, such as tabbed browsing, which by itself is worth switching to Firefox. And there's a thriving community of developers writing extensions for features that aren't built into the default browser. Thunderbird, the email companion to Firefox, isn't as full featured as Outlook - it doesn't have any calendar functions, for example, but like Firefox, it's small and fast, and it's much more secure than Outlook.

The Internet can be a dangerous place, what with viruses, worms, trojans, adware, spyware and other nasty things, now lumped under the generic label of malware. Even if you are behind a hardware firewall or router, you should use a software firewall, which will warn you about potentially dangerous outgoing traffic - often the first sign of a problem. I use the free version of Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm - it's easy to configure and use. If you don't want to keep paying Symantec or McAfee an annual fee for updated anti-virus subscriptions, AVG has a free anti-virus scanner. As for adware and spyware, there are several free tools, including Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search and Destroy. However, the best of the lot is Microsoft AntiSpyware, which has found several nasties that the other tools missed, and has the best interface and reporting of all the tools I've used. It's in beta at the moment, but is eminently usable, and if you are running Windows, you should use it.

The most useful piece of software I've come across in the last few months has to be Copernic Desktop Search, which is now up to version 1.5. This will index most of the files on your hard drive, including your email (both Outlook and Thunderbird are now supported), and give you virtually instant access to any file on your PC. There are several other good desktop search tools available now, including programs by Google and Yahoo, so if you don't like Copernic, try one of the others. Once you've used one, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

About 10 years ago, when I was working at Dow Jones Markets, I used a program called ECCO PRO to keep track of things I had to do for projects. ECCO PRO was one of the earliest PIMs - personal information managers. Unlike programs that were built around contact databases or email, ECCO was built around an outliner - but it was an outliner on steroids. If you think of each item in an outline being a line in a spreadsheet, then add add columns to items, and then filter on the columns, you begin to get an idea of how you could use it. ECOO PRO didn't do well in the marketplace, and I lost track of it after it stopped working after Windows 98 came out. However, it turns out that it was taken up by someone else and it's being maintained, at least to the point where it runs under Windows XP. Even better, it's a free download. (Though you do need to register to get it). There is a fairly active user community around it, including a Yahoo group. ECCO PRO isn't as flashy as Microsoft OneNote, for example, and it's more complicated than TreePad Plus, which I've been using for years, but it's far more flexible and powerful than either of those. It's close to being an ideal solution for tracking all the little bits of information that you need to assemble and manage a large documentation project.

Finally, I should mention something that is sure to be an essential purchase for every technical writer. On Friday, April 1, Adobe announced the release of FrameMaker 8. This is the long-awaited complete rewrite of FrameMaker with a modern interface compatible with the other Adobe CS products and a new layout engine that converts all documents to PhotoShop PSD format. Files are then saved using a revolutionary OCR technique that compresses them to texting message format. Each copy of FrameMaker 8 will come with an SMS-enabled phone as an input/output device.

Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 16 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site and has recently started a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children, a cat, and an ever growing collection of Grateful Dead CDs.