Check out Carol Johnson's book The Language of Work: Technical Communication at Lukens Steel, 1810 to 1925 . It puts technical writing in a bigger perspective.

The cool thing is dragging meaning out of a corpus of documents.

First, I wrote a book on Programming with Python. It was back in the Python 2.0 days (2001 or thereabouts.) I used AppleWorks, and it was fun. Write all you want, put in formulae, code samples, everything. A few style sheets to give it a reasonable look and I …

Kontrawize author Anthony Coates warns that this is an attractive time sink. Thanks for the heads up.

My first round of research found HTML Slidy , but didn't find DocUtils + S5 . S5 is simpler and does less than Slidy. RST markup is far easier to cope with than HTML. This looks …

PPT has one big advantage: it is written by the same people who wrote Windows. So it can seize the Windows display and keyboard, and take control over the entire UI. I happen to think that's A Bad Thing™ but I may be in the minority on that.

Of course …

I've been using the Apache FOP http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ to transform XSL:FO into PDF's. FOP works well enough for some DocBook processing, but it can't handle really complex stuff gracefully.

Can we also use this XSL:FO technology for producing PDF form letters as part of a …