Document Conversion
Craig Wright, Technical Writer
Document Conversion
Craig Wright – Technical writer and copywriter
Need to convert your documentation to a different format?
There are many benefits to moving your content to a modern technical authoring tool. Applications like Paligo and Flare can make it much easier to produce content to scale, thanks to their content reuse features and ability to output to different formats. But to make the most of the new tools, you will need to transfer your legacy content over, and that can be a fair amount of work.
The good news is that you don’t have to convert content and tidy up your pages and topics yourself – I can do it for you, as part of my document conversion service.
Document Conversion for Different Budgets
With conversions, it would be silly of me to offer a single ‘one size fits all’ service, as your requirements may differ to that of other clients. You might just want me to get your content into a new system and you will tidy it up later, whereas others might want me to provide a more in-depth conversion. To cater for that, I provide two different conversion services:
Document Conversion – Light
Document Conversion – Full
With my full conversion service, I’ll convert and set up your documents so that they take advantage of the features available in your new system.
Working from your original documentation, I will:
- Edit your content so that it is suitable for topic based systems (if needed)
- Add links for better navigation
- Restructure your content, if needed
- Make sure your content is coded correctly and uses the correct styles
- Apply a content reuse strategy (if needed)
- Set up Flare master pages and page layouts (if needed)
- Apply Paligo PDF and HTML5 settings (plus minor CSS changes to Paligo output).
The Full Service can include an edit/rewrite if you want it to. That’s entirely up to you. Rewrites will take longer, and so will cost you more, but may be worth it if your content is lacking quality or quantity. The biggest problem I run into is content that is describing a product rather than explaining how to use it (software documentation is often the worst culprit).
How Much Does Document Conversion Cost?
What Types of Document Conversion?
During my (20 years and counting) career as a technical writer, I’ve carried out a lot of conversion work, including:
- FrameMaker to Word
- Word to FrameMaker
- FrameMaker to Flare
- InDesign to Flare
- Word to Confluence
- Confluence to Flare
- Flare to Paligo
- Flare to Zendesk
- Word to Paligo
- Paligo to Zendesk
- Zendesk to Paligo
I can handle all of those, although complex layouts in InDesign documents may be a problem. If you need any of those conversions or have a different requirement, let me know what you need and I’ll take a look.