Posts tagged tools
What is the difference between "topic-based authoring" and "modular authoring"? As I know, there are two well-known authoring approaches: Narrative authoring; Topic-based authoring (see link abo...
I'm working on a magic system that works with weaving types of power. The most commonly used power source is a magical code. I'm trying to base this code off of latex. LaTeX is a math code that is ...
I'm an engineer. At my company, engineers seem to spend a lot of time reviewing technical documentation written by people who work in different offices and time zones. Part of the reason we spend...
I've been writing a book that has a fair share of geometric diagrams and equations. However, I am unable to make use of a computer for this and have been maintaining a journal where I manually draw...
For online, developer-centered documentation for a complex software product, which structure is going to be more usable: a smaller number of long, comprehensive pages, or a larger number of more gr...
I've been looking for a certain piece of software for a long time, but I never quite found something that matches what I need. I'm a very visually oriented guy, the best way for me to keep track of...
As technology advances and workflows are streamlined, some have turned to automated tools such as Doxygen, Sphinx, Swagger, etc. in order to generate technical documentation automatically. What ar...
In our documentation, we write binary numbers like this: 1010 But we write hexadecimal numbers like this: 0xABAB Now, according to the GCC compiler conventions: Numbers are normally written in...
Are they "if-else statements" or are they "if/else statements"? I'm partial to the latter, but I can see the logic of the former - both "if" and "else" are acting as a unit modifier for the noun "s...
Frequently, at least in the software world, it seems that terms get assigned a meaning over time that is more general than the original definition. REST is a good example of this. While REST refe...
At this point, many languages have some "standard" format for writing documentation for individual methods. This includes, for example, Java Annotation and Microsoft's XML Documentation for .NET La...
Our tech comm team has a wide variety of time-consuming, repetitive tasks they we need to automate. We are mainly using Sphinx, reStructuredText, Adobe Illustrator, and Visio. Specific things we n...
We have a tool that we cannot replace that does not support single sourcing. As a result, with instructions that involve the same node, we either repeat the same dozen steps over and over, or refer...
Quickly communicating data lineage to other stakeholders in our organization has become increasingly difficult as we scale. What are effective strategies to address this and keep it maintained? A...
I am writing the release documentation for a software product and a design flaw has been discovered after the code has been frozen. Does the documentation describing this issue change if the produc...
The deadline is looming and someone realizes the product can't be shipped without documentation. Once the product leaves the remit of the software engineers (who obviously only ever write wonderful...
I am working on a commentary on Ethics of the Fathers and I want readers to be able to read sources I'm quoting in their original Hebrew. I am getting most of my sources from sefaria.org and unfort...
I wrote a play that I performed this summer, and have done significant re-writes for an upcoming second performance run. In order to help me relearn my lines, I think it would be useful to see whic...
I'm new here. In the past, I've written countless articles for newspapers, and I almost never needed to edit more than a page or two. However, I have agreed to edit an entire (existing) novel for ...
There's no justification set in my document, and in Edit Compile Format I've turned off justification in body text and all other styles. Yet the PDF continues to output with justification. How ca...
I was wondering if there were any open source (free also works) writing software that includes version control (e.g. git). I'm thinking of writing my own but I don't want to create something that a...
I have seen these diagrams in books. They display the strings of the guitar and the locations of the notes I want to present, as well as the name of the chord/scale/etc. You can see what I mean in ...
How does it change the writing process? Any suggestions on the various dictation software available?
I am writing the built-in help for a command line program. The exact name is irrelevant, so let's use foo as a placeholder. This utility can be called with some arguments (like foo -v) or without ...
I do my writing in MS Word. I must incorporate some theater-like scenes into a book. In the theater-like scenes, there will be three to five characters speaking lines. Very, very occasionally a ...
I'm working on some guidelines for localization of a computer program. We recently added descriptions to most of the settings, and most of the labels are user contributed and in many cases awful. ...
Is it possible to set top and bottom margins to ZERO in Scrivenings mode so that I do not have big spaces between documents? Thanks!
I would like to self-publish a book and sell it through Amazon, and also make it available in a variety of electronic formats. I recently bought a book for $35 as an electronic download from the a...
I'm using Google Docs to both write a story and to create a dictionary of sorts for ease of writing. I'm trying to figure out a way that I can either have a word suggestion box pop up on Google Doc...
I found this freeware app, labytrinth, years ago. It allowed to create elements (characters, places, objects, etc) and detail information about them. Then you could drag these elements into a wide ...
I'm writing a paper for IEEE using Microsoft office Word 2013. I want to use dynamic reference which is available in this version of Word. In a place of my article the references are similar to: ...
I am planning to write a book about an open source software product. Should I contact the creator of that software and get their explicit permission for writing the book? Or can I continue without ...
Let's say I have a 6 page document. (MS Word) I want the first 3 pages to be numbered i, ii, iii and the remaining 3 pages to be numbered 1, 2, 3 How can I achieve this? I tried the automatic n...
I was wondering if anyone has used yWriter for Mac and has downloaded it from Softonic. I feel a little iffy about this site(pic attached). I suppose a better question would be: Is it safe to downl...
My question is similar to this one, but with (hopefully) a clearly defined use case: sharing and reviewing basic tech docs with a minimal, intuitive GUI. I'm producing technical documents using MS...
I'm searching for a tool that would make real-time suggestions based on "real world" text. The only corpus-based tool I know of is Writefull - does anybody know of any others?
I am in the process of applying to several graduate school, so I need to write several Statements of Purpose (SOP). English is not my first language and my writing skills are average at best. Are t...
A Quick Note I asked if this was an okay topic over on Meta, and they said it should be okay, as long as I "describe the writing-related context -- what you're writing, who (if anybody) you're col...
I currently use Google Drive/Docs to pen all of my novels and short stories, but really feel that I could do with a management suite of sorts, such as Scrivener. However, as Scrivener costs actual...
I must write a book for the university and I am looking for software. The style that I want is like the books of O'Reilly, Apress or Packt. I need: Insert a table of contents (automatic). Divide...
I just volunteered to produce the concert program booklets for a recital series starting in October and I'm wondering what is the best way to go about creating a multi-page booklet that would inclu...
I am formatting a document as a novel using OpenOffice Writer. I have a paragraph style for the main body, and another style derived from it that is the first paragraph in a chapter. I've set up t...
Okay, there are like a billion outliners out there but I'm not sure if there is one that does what I want. Maybe you can help. I want to write chunks of text without headline, numbering, bullets....
I have a couple of folders with artwork, maps etc. I would like to include this folders to my scrivener project but I don't know how. The furthest I've got is to drag files from folder to Scrivene...
There were a couple of other questions about this, but they were asked many years ago, so I thought I'd start a new one. For a long time, I used Wiki on a Stick to organise my worlds and allow for...
I'm writing a book – more as a hobby than anything else. As an amateur I often get lost regarding the extent I should include in the chapters. But the greatest problem for me is that I did not de...
Qualifier/Disclaimer This may be a very atypical question for this site (of all those I've seen, this question on superuser seems most closely related to mine, but the question was closed as off-t...
Recently, I found a short story that I had written many years ago when computers were not that common. It is 25 pages of handwriting. Obviously, I don't want to spend hours typing it. My typing spe...
I'm using a plain text editor (Vim) to write a fiction piece (chapter book), and I'm wondering what markup languages others use for such a task? I'm looking for something exceedingly simple, it doe...
I am looking to write a book on Physics/Mathematics. Of course this book will need to include mathematical equations and diagrams. Are there any writing softwares that have devices such as TeX and...