

Writing great documentation: you need an editor - jacobian
http://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/editors/

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tezza
I recommend the Economist Style Guide. My friends who are print journalists
regard it highly. A slim novella of the guide is available for offline
reference.

 _"This guide is based on the style book which is given to all journalists at
The Economist."_ <http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide/>

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jbellis
I was hoping this was going to reveal the secrets of which editor makes
docbook not suck.

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wisty
"Change your margins" is one trick for reviewing your own text. The author
says it makes it easier to be impersonal.

I wonder if changing your highlighting scheme would help you review your own
code?

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tel
My favorite trick for self editing is an extension on the "change your
margins" trick. My print writing/publishing cycle involves typesetting, so
even if it's not going to be used for my final target I typeset things in
LaTeX and then edit them there. Wide margins and a totally different
presentation from my monospaced text editor makes detachment much, much
easier.

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angelbob
Usually it annoys me that I edit my blog post with narrow (editing HTML)
margins, then see it at full width after I hit "post".

As he points out here, even a little trick like that _does_ make it easier to
edit. And I _do_ manage to find a lot of my flaws very quickly. So I guess I'm
benefiting from this trick.

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Torn
Slightly o/t: Does the font on his site look awful to anyone else? In opera,
the site looks like this for me, which is horrible. I have to mash the
readability script bookmarklet to read it: <http://imgur.com/ODnjY.png>

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bajsejohannes
Slightly off-topic, indeed :)

But yes, I have the same problem. I'm using Opera too, and use shift+g to
disable stylesheets when reading that page. (You need to enable single-key
shortcuts for this to work)

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ramchip
Another Opera user chiming in, same problem. On Windows. Thanks for the
shortcut.

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GiraffeNecktie
He makes some good points, but you don't necessarily have to ask before
editing open source docs. For example, if they're publishing in a wiki you can
pretty much assume its ok to jump right in and start editing.

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dstorrs
"Writing great documentation: you need an editor"

I use Emacs.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

