r/technicalwriting

I'm looking for advice from other technical writers who work with industrial equipment or manufacturing documentation.

Currently, I create user manuals in Adobe FrameMaker and publish them as PDFs. This worked reasonably well when we had a limited number of products, but it has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Our situation:

• We manufacture industrial equipment.
• We have hundreds of manuals.
• Many manuals are several hundred pages long.
• We support multiple product variants that share large amounts of content.
• Manuals must also be translated into multiple languages.
• Content updates often need to be applied across numerous documents.
• PDF remains an important deliverable, but it is no longer an efficient source format.

The biggest challenge is content reuse. FrameMaker allows some reuse mechanisms, but maintaining common content across hundreds of documents is becoming unsustainable. Translation costs and update management are also growing significantly.

I'm exploring a possible migration to a more modern documentation platform, preferably one that:

• Supports component-based authoring and content reuse.
• Handles large technical documentation sets.
• Works well for industrial equipment documentation (not just software documentation).
• Supports translation workflows and multilingual publishing.
• Ideally provides web-based publishing as well.

Many platforms I find seem heavily focused on software documentation and developer portals rather than traditional equipment user manuals, installation guides, maintenance manuals, and service documentation.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. No MadCap Flare or Paligo. The pricing is just too high and management will say no.

Background info: I am wrapping up a pure maths master with no formal writing education. The only academic writing experience I have is the thesis' I had to write throughout my degree. These revealed to me that I quite enjoy this genre of writing, breaking down complicated ideas in my own words.

I suppose that I am at quite the disadvantage compared to someone who has had some form of eduction in writing. However, is there some advantage to having an advanced understanding of university level mathematics? How can one best approach the technical writing job market without any prior experience? Is it best to start in another job and to freelance a handful of articles in order to build a portfolio? Are there any truly entry level positions?

Hi! I work for a company that develops xml/dita authoring software, and I’m curious what's your experience:

1. Is the learning curve too high, coming from simpler tools like Word?
2. Are there parts of the authoring process that feel unnecessarily complicated?
3. What’s something you wish your tool did better?
4. Is there not enough documentation (pun intended) about learning dita?

Update: Thanks for all the in-depth responses!

I recently started overseeing our product teams technical writer. Currently they write and post all technical guides (for users and api focused for devs) using Word and then public PDFs to a public facing html site. There are now over 70+ guides supporting 1 brand / product line.

There has to be a better solution for this. Our development team always says he needs a developer portal but that sometimes seems too complicated.

What are industry standards for the technical writing process and leading cms systems to post user guides?

Hey guys,

I have recently started working as a part time (20 hours per week) tech writer and QC for a start up. So, I need help in setting clear expectations. Yesterday was my first assignment and it took me a really long time to reproduce the article well (it was 5 pages long).

I really want to explain how long it will take to produce a single article, like I know it depends on the number of words and all. But I'm struggling a little to quantify the amount of time I'm working on it, as I have ADHD and I'm getting back to working again after a health related thing.

Any tips will be helpful.

Thank you!

I've been an engineering TW for 8 years and have been tasked with coming up with an independent development plan for my career. I have the resources to enroll in classes to further my skills. I have previously taken AutoCAD and Inventor courses and my current job has me creating installation instructions via AutoCAD and Word/Adobe. Because I've only ever worked at the same place since college I worry that my scope of skills and knowledge is limited and if I were to seek employment as a TW elsewhere I wouldn't have the competitive edge I'd like.

So, I would love to hear from other TWs if there were any courses you took that you felt were beneficial for your career growth and versatility. My educational background is in biochemistry and research papers and I kinda fell into engineering TW out of college. I've mostly learned on the job as far as engineering drafting standards go without having formal engineering education. Thank you in advance!