Inspired by the Cambridge group’s Style Guide clinic we will be holding a clinic for Release Notes.

This will be held on the 6th June at MadLab (in the trendy Northern Quarter of Manchester) from 7pm – 9pm.

In this clinic will look a various types of release notes how they vary from company to company and try and answer the following questions. How vital are they? What exactly should we put in them? How long and detailed should they be? How can they be distributed? Does anyone actually read them?

If you plan to attend we encourage you to bring along a copy of some of your own release notes so we can compare them with others. Bring paper copies or a copy on a memory stick. Talk us through them and we will compare them with others. The idea is that, after plenty of questions and discussions, by the end of the evening we may have made some interesting observations and conclusions.

Further Details and booking can be found at eventbrite here: http://nwtcgjune2013.eventbrite.co.uk/#

If you are contributing by bringing your own release notes please make sure you get a “I’m bringing mine ticket”.

This will be a planning  meeting  to discuss our plans for the following year or so. If you are interested in technical communication, information design, technical editing etc and would like to be involved then come along. We are looking for volunteers to speak on subjects covering the whole range of technical communication, as well as people who are willing to offer up some of their time to help run the group.

The meeting will take place on 2nd May, 7pm – 9pm, at MadLab. Further details and booking can be found on Eventbrite.

The group met on 7th March for a presentation by Richard Pineger on ‘Exploring the XML of DITA’.  Richard introduced the basic ideas behind DITA, then went on to demonstrate how they can be used in practice with the oXygen XML editing tool.  We looked at how to create topics of different types, how oXygen helps the author to create valid DITA and how to publish the same content to four different outputs.  Richard also demonstrated some of oXygen’s more powerful features, such as it’s Xpath search function – something I will definitely be making use of in future.  Finally we looked at source control and how to use subversion to manage DITA content.

Richard demonstrated how it is possible for a lone author, using free or very affordable tools, to author successfully in DITA.  The authoring tools (especially oXygen) are getting more user-friendly all the time and it gave me a lot of ideas on how to help my smaller clients, without the budget for a CCMS, begin their DITA journey.

• The XML editor, map manager, and the topic editor
• xpath search and regular expressions
• Collaborative version control with subversion
• Simple XSL for making repeated changes

Booking: Reserve your place here http://xmldita.eventbrite.co.uk/#

The North West Regional group will be holding this event on Thursday 7th February at 7pm:

Speaker: Rachel Johnston

Description: Everyone in the tech comms community is talking about DITA and its benefits, but in practice, DITA adoption can be challenging. In this session we’ll be talking about the barriers to DITA adoption, how they can be overcome and the practical factors you need to consider before making the move.

Rachel has been a technical author for over ten years, working in a variety of settings from software to healthcare. In the last year she has joined Mekon as a consultant, advising clients on how they can use structured authoring tools and techniques to create, manage and share content more effectively.

Booking: Via Event Brite http://ditareality-es2.eventbrite.co.uk/

Location: MadLab Manchester, http://madlab.org.uk/content/north-west-technical-communicators-group-15/