International technology transfer and its effect on technical documentation

The author discusses the working relationship between Compass Inc. (a software development firm located in Wakefield, Massachusetts), and SUPRENUM, a West German supercomputer design and manufacturing consortium. She focuses on the impact of this relationship on technical documentation. The Compass and SUPRENUM relationship exposed many technical documentation issues. Many factors in an international technology transfer that create documentation problems were found. Compass, however, did not have to contend with a multilingual problem; all of the documentation was written in English. Many of the difficulties were solved through the joint effort of Compass and SUPRENUM engineers. Specific documentation issues were addressed by creating a new technical documentation system, called Make-tex. Make-tex allowed Compass to standardize files, make global changes, conditionally include information, and produce a customer-specific source file. Continued use of Make-tex has proved that one source file can be tailored to produce numerous customer-specific files. Currently, Compass uses this strategy for six versions of the Fortran language reference manual