Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 14, 2006 04:27 AM
A "technical writer" is generally understood to be someone who writes documentation for products, which the writer had no real part in creating, as his/her main way of earning a living. Microsoft employs technical writers to write the manuals for MS Word, Excel, etc.
Where does the TeX/LaTeX user community fit into this picture?
It doesn't. TeX/LaTeX is widely used in the academic world; researchers use it to write their books and papers. It's also used in the FOSS community for documentation, but the people who use it are mostly programmers documenting their own programs. I don't know of anyone using TeX/LaTeX whose sole job is writing documents, although presumably there are some.
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Re:What is a technical writer?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 14, 2006 04:27 AMA "technical writer" is generally understood to be someone who writes documentation for products, which the writer had no real part in creating, as his/her main way of earning a living. Microsoft employs technical writers to write the manuals for MS Word, Excel, etc.
Where does the TeX/LaTeX user community fit into this picture?
It doesn't. TeX/LaTeX is widely used in the academic world; researchers use it to write their books and papers. It's also used in the FOSS community for documentation, but the people who use it are mostly programmers documenting their own programs. I don't know of anyone using TeX/LaTeX whose sole job is writing documents, although presumably there are some.
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