How to Express a Continuous Cycle Visually in a Word Technical Document

“Continuous Cycle” is a fairly common idea both in life and in technical communication. Seasons form a continuous cycle that never ends: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, etc. In technical writing the process of writing, editing, reviewing, releasing also forms a process that never ends. It’s a continuous cycle that repeats itself. You can…

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How to Draw a Circuit Resistor with Adobe Illustrator

Resistors are common components of many electrical circuit diagrams. Here is how you can draw a good-looking resistor in Adobe Illustrator: (1) Draw a straight line with the Pen tool and select it. (2) Select Effect > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag from the main menu to display the Zig Zag dialog box: (3)…

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How to Edit Vector Drawing Objects in Inkscape

Inkscape is a great vector drawing software with poor documentation. Most people quit using Inkscape after a few tries because the GUI looks different than that of (say) Illustrator. Although I use Illustrator for most of my technical drawings I can’t help but appreciate the amount of functionality packed into Inkscape, which is after all…

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Simple Diagrams: Draw a Blackboard-and-Chalk Diagram

Simple Diagrams is proof that we’ve come a full-circle in technical illustration. We started fifty years ago with nothing more than a blackboard and a fistful of chalk. If we had any colored chalks we considered ourselves lucky. That was my elementary school experience. Then we went through the Photoshop + Illustrator revolution in the…

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How to Slide Sideways into Technical Writing

©  Ugur Akinci “Ugur, I know technical writing is a good niche, it pays well, and I want to do it. But how and where do I begin? I have not done it before and any time I apply for a technical writing position they ask me to show what I did earlier…” is a…

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How to Join Two Open Paths in Adobe Illustrator

The PEN is one of the most powerful tools in Adobe Illustrator: You basically can draw anything you like with it. With PEN you can draw both OPEN and CLOSED paths: More often than not, in technical illustration we use CLOSED paths to represent different drawing objects — buttons, circuit boards, capacitors, door bells, car…

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