Who is John Pitt?
I'm a technical writer, specialising in using Adobe FrameMaker to produce complex user documentation for computer software users. I started with paper (and yes, I even worked with hot metal), but now produce mainly PDFs, WinHelp, HTML Help, WebWorks Publisher Help and various flavours of HTML, XML, etc. (If you have read this far, you know the language.)
After graduating from one of the old-style agricultural colleges, I was an agricultural extension worker in Papua New Guinea from 1965 to 1974 — I went there as a callow 19-year-old, and grew up very quickly.
I moved back to Australia in 1974 to do further study, then worked with the NSW Dept of Agriculture in western NSW from 1975 to 1980. As part of my job, I wrote and edited newsletters, produced and presented short radio programs and organised rural groups.
I changed careers in 1980 when I moved to Sydney, still with Agriculture, firstly as a science writer, then as the head of publishing and information.
When the Department decided to move to the bush in 1990, city life had become the life for me, so I moved to private enterprise. After a short stint with a small defence publishing firm, I joined Ceedata (a professional accountancy software house, now part of MYOB) as Documentation Manager, and stayed with them until 1997.
Since then I have been a contract technical writer, working on large document and Help sets for software companies.
If you are interested in the details, click on the link below. Like all my documents, it was created in FrameMaker and then converted to suit the user (in this case, using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 — if you don't have Acrobat Reader on your PC, download it for free from Adobe.com).
