Mike Gascoigne, BSc, MS, CEng, MIChemE, FISTC.
Don't take shortcuts. Hire a professional author. Click here to find out why. I am a freelance technical author with a chemical engineering background, based in Blackwater on the Surrey/Hants border in England, close to the M3 which runs from London to Southampton. To contact me, send a mail message. Availability I can get involved in your documentation projects on a full-time or part-time basis, depending on my availability. Group Support Although I work mainly as an individual, assisted by my wife Fiona who does various administrative jobs, I also have the support of a wider network of qualified and experienced technical authors who are members of the ISTC Independent Authors' Special Interest Group. Collectively we are able to manage large and complex projects that may require the use of additional resources at short notice.

Low Cost Publishing for Industrial and Retail Markets

In addition to my technical authoring work, I have an interest in ancient history and have written and published some books that are featured on my other website under the name of Anno Mundi Books. These were formatted to print-ready condition using Microsoft Word for the pages and Paint Shop Pro for the paperback covers. Copies are produced using small volume digital printing, typically 50 or 100 at a time, although there is no lower limit to a print run. The printer, Lightning Source, runs a fulfilment service so that my books are offered for wholesale distribution and are available in retail shops by special order. When a book is ordered through the fulfilment service, a single copy is printed and sent to the shop, a process known as "print on demand". My Anno Mundi website includes eCommerce linked to WorldPay, so that people can place orders and they are supplied from the copies that I keep in stock.

Small volume digital printing costs slightly more than offset printing, (about £2 extra per copy) but huge savings can be made by printing exactly the number you want, and there is no need for long print runs. The benefits are as follows:

• For commercial and industrial purposes, you can print the number you need for a specific business requirement. For example, if some of your clients or business colleagues are coming to a meeting, you might want to give each of them a manual for your latest product.
• If you have written a book for retail markets, you don't have to go cap in hand to a publisher saying "Will you publish my book?". The setup costs for digital printing are typically less than £100, so that it becomes easily affordable to individual authors. There are other costs associated with marketing and distribution, but we are looking at a few hundred pounds and not thousands. You can take control of the situation and publish your own book, and I would be happy to offer a consultancy service to anyone who is embarking on this process for the first time.

I can also assist with the preparation of eBooks, which look the same as printed books except that they are distributed electronically and are read from a computer screen or hand-held device. Files downloaded from the Internet can be linked to the user's hardware or zip disk to protect the author's copyright and prevent redistribution.

For further details of the technical and marketing issues, see my article on eBooks and Print on Demand (PDF - requires Acrobat Reader, available free from Adobe Systems). This article was published in the Spring 2003 issue of Communicator, the journal of the ISTC.

Teaching and Training

In September 2003, I obtained a City & Guilds Stage 1 Certificate in Teaching Adult Learners. I can use this for training purposes and preparation of training materials.

ISTC Award Winner 1999

Production of Manuals and User Guides

I have a wide experience of technical authoring in a variety of industries, including computer software and engineering.

I write and publish manuals using appropriate documentation and graphics tools such as Microsoft Word, FrameMaker, Ventura Publisher and Paint Shop Pro. If necessary, I can prepare PDF and PostScript output files for printing the finished manuals.

I can also produce documentation in the form of on-line help text.

Computing and Engineering Documentation

I have experience of producing manuals and help text for the engineering industries, where the products and systems are usually computer-based to some extent. My work has included the following:

• Computer Aided Design (CAD) with links to Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and Finite Element Analysis (FE).
• Gas and electricity supply and monitoring systems.
• Gas cylinder filling systems.
• Instrumentation.
• Maintenance management systems.
• Motor vehicles and forklift trucks.
• Industrial Sites.

Starting from either finished or development versions of a client's product, I evaluate and test it, and write about it from my observations and results. Since I initially approach a product as a new user, the documentation reflects the user's point of view. During the testing period, extensive consultation takes place with engineers, programmers and designers to make sure the documentation is correct. Sometimes I might recommend changes to the product if I think it might be helpful to the user.

Chemical Engineering Documentation

During my days as a permanent employee, I worked as a Chemical Engineer for British Petroleum on the following projects which were all safety-critical:

• Separation of gas, oil and water, and in particular the use of porous materials which have a coalescing effect on oil/water emulsions, causing them to separate. I worked on a small-scale pilot plant in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, to remove water from the oil coming out of a "nodding donkey" type oil well. Then I went to Qatar and worked on a full-scale test plant which separated water from oil which came out of the ground under pressure.
• Evaporation and dispersion of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in the event of spillage. I carried out practical field tests at the BP Kent Refinery, involving an open barrel of LPG mounted on a stand with a pivot bearing. The barrel was tipped over by pulling a rope and the LPG evaporated on contact with the ground. The gas cloud was measured by thermal conductivity meters mounted downwind. I also carried out tests in which an open vessel containing different substrates, such as sand, clay and gravel, was placed on a weighing machine and a measured quantity of LPG was poured onto the substrate. The evaporation rate was measured from the change in weight. Then I worked on mathematical models, written in Fortran, to predict the evaporation and dispersion of liquefied gases under a variety of conditions. The model calculations were compared with the field test results to make adjustments and obtain greater accuracy.

I am a member of both the Institution of Chemical Engineers and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators. I will be pleased to hear about any documentation requirements within the chemical engineering industry, whether they are related to the above projects or otherwise.

Medical Industries

Doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners are among the most prolific users of instrumentation, from the simple stethoscope to the most sophisticated ultrasound scanners and radiological imaging systems. While these are becoming more complex, in terms of their features and capabilities, some of them are becoming increasingly miniaturised, portable and easy to use. For example, ultrasound scanners used to be large devices occupying about one cubic metre, but now they are available as a program running on a laptop PC with a handheld scanner which can be used by a doctor on a home visit. Blood pressure monitors, heart rate monitors and a variety of other self-testing kits are available over the counter at pharmacies, for use by patients. These are becoming increasingly simple to use, for example blood pressure monitors have been reduced to an armband and digital display for easy self-testing, a feat that was almost impossible with the old manual kits that required simultaneous use of an armband and stethoscope.

While the instruments are becoming more sophisticated and at the same time more user-friendly, the documentation often leaves something to be desired, having been written by engineers who are too involved with the product and cannot see it from the user's point of view. Sometimes important features are missed because the process of documentation and review relies too heavily on doctors and nurses who understand the purpose well enough but are too busy to get involved with the detail.

If you require any help with your medical equipment documentation, please get in touch with me. I might be able to help.

Renewable Energy

Oil prices have been steadily rising for a number of years because of the political situation in the Middle East and the increasing demand for supplies from developing countries, especially in the Far East. There are concerns that the Western World has to become self-sustaining in its energy supply, giving a boost to the renewable energy industry which has been steadily growing for some years. The major sources of renewable energy are:

• Solar energy
• Wind turbines
• Wave power
• Photovoltaic cells
• Biomass fuels
• Hydrogen

The fastest growing areas are wind turbines and biomass. Wind turbines have to be used in combination with other systems, otherwise there is no power when the wind drops. A solution to this problem is the use of wind power to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen which can be recombined in a fuel cell to produce electricity according to demand. Hydrogen will also become important as a motor vehicle fuel, and there are prototype vehicles currently in service.

Biomass fuels are available as vegetable oil which can be processed into biodiesel, for use in ordinary diesel engines without the need for engine modification. Biodiesel is slightly more viscous than petrodiesel, and it might lead to cold-starting problems, but it can be mixed with petrodiesel to thin it out.

I will be interested in working on any projects associated with renewable energy.

Help Text Authoring

Have you noticed that printed manuals have been getting thinner, or disappearing altogether? That's because the increased sophistication of Windows hypertext has encouraged people more and more to use on-line documentation.

Various types of Help system have been available since the earliest versions of Windows. They all have various features in common, including text and graphic hotspots so you can jump between topics, display popups and execute commands. There are also keyword searches, bookmarks, user-defined annotations and browse sequences. All of this makes is possible for you to find information very quickly.

Windows Help (hlp) files are created by using Microsoft Word to produce the source documents, and then running a Help compiler.

HTML Help (chm) files are created by using an HTML editor to produce a set of Web pages, then running an HTML Help compiler. This type of help file can interact more easily with the internet.

I can produce Help systems to suit all your authoring and publishing needs.

Web Page Authoring and Multimedia

HTML is the standard format for documents that are intended for uploading to the World Wide Web. Send me your text and graphics, together with your instructions about links to other pages, mailbox fields and other special features, and I will make up your pages for you. I can also upload your pages to the Web, depending on where they are being hosted.

In recent years, JavaScript has become increasingly popular, in combination with HTML, for making web pages more animated and dynamic, with the ability to process data and perform calculations. Please contact me if you require any web page authoring that uses JavaScript. See also the JavaScript topic.

Multimedia is the combination of different types of media including text, graphics, sound, video and animation. It can be distributed on high-capacity media such as CD-ROM or on the Internet in combination with HTML web pages. I can produce multimedia programs using the following tools:

• Macromedia Director and Flash MX for animations.
• Adobe Premiere for video editing.
• Audacity for audio editing and conversion to MP3.

Other Technical Authors

In the UK:

ISTC Independent Authors' Special Interest Group

International:

Society for Technical Communication - USA, with Chapters in Belgium, France, and Israel.

Updated May 2006

Mike Gascoigne