We analyzed texts from years 1800-2004 from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Two-thousand-word sections from about 20 articles published at 25-year intervals (1800, 1825, 1850, etc.) for a total of 127 articles were analyzed by a new tool (Coh-metrix) developed by McNamara, Louwerse, and Graesser [9] at the University of Memphis' Institute for Intelligent Systems. The study discerned significant differences in four general measurement areas: word information, connectives, causal cohesion, and syntactic complexity. Specifically, there was a significant decrease in concreteness, imagability, number of causal verbs, number of causal particles, number of connectives (including total number of connectives, and positive temporal and causal connectives), and the mean number of higher-level constituents per sentence and per word. We also found a significant increase in age of acquisition, syntactic complexity (measured in mean number of modifiers per noun phrase), and indicators of analytical and logical difficulty.

The creation process of technical documentation is an expensive and time-consuming task especially for complex products. To make this process more cost-efficient computerized support is required. Furthermore new technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality will be increasingly used to visualize repair manuals or operating instructions in the future adding even more to the authoring process. The availability of a suitable authoring environment will be a precondition for the deployment of technical documentations based on these new technologies. Reusing data from the engineering process in an adequate way seems to be a viable means to augment technical authoring. However, the available CAD data lacks necessary information being obligatory for the authoring process. E.g. there is no dismantling information on screws or other peripheral equipment around the CAD-components. This gap can be filled by specific metadata which augments the engineering data. This paper provides a model for such metadata and gives an overview of the possibilities this approach for the authoring of technical documentations.

The six best practices of software development can be applied to the development of each component of a finished product or project. Each organization within an enterprise can design and implement a process that encompasses these best practices. And there are software development tools that enable each best practice.This paper describes the six best practices, the tools that enable them, and demonstrates how they can be applied to information development, as well as other all components of software development.This paper also provides an example that illustrates how documentation groups or organizations can benefit by following these best practices to ensure success for information development projects.

This paper examines the relationships between Christopher Alexander's Fifteen Properties of living structures, found in The Nature of Order, and Edward Tufte's Principles of Information Design, found in Envisioning Information. In the examination of examples of Tufte's Principles, we find commonality between the Principles and Alexander's Fifteen Properties.

Collaborative document processing has been addressed by many approaches so far, most of which focus on document versioning and collaborative editing. We address this issue from a different angle and describe the concept and architecture of a pervasive document editing and managing system. It exploits database techniques and real-time updating for sophisticated collaboration scenarios on multiple devices. Each user is always served with up-to-date documents and can organize his work based on document meta data. For this, we present our conceptual architecture for such a system and discuss it with an example.