9to5 Media Services – tl;dr *

Welcome to our too long, didn’t read document.

“Who are you?”

We are 9to5 Media Services. Our business:
We liberate content by making it accessible in all relevant languages and formats.

“What services do you provide?”

Tech brands need to move fast, and they usually have bigger problems than polishing and translating manuals, quick guides, and other product literature. This is where we come in. Our promise to you: “Global on Launch”. When we do our job right, all product literature will be available in all relevant formats and languages when your product hits stores.

LOOPS is our single-source publishing workflow for product literature. It allows us to create robust sources that can easily be converted to relevant formats such as HTML and PDF. We rely on proven software tools and our decades of experience to ensure that the English-language templates are translation-friendly and can be translated quickly and to a high standard by both humans and machine translation engines.

Specs and Docs is our hosting platform for product literature, but using it is optional. As a 9to5 Media Services client, you own your documents, in all languages and formats, and there are no data silos that would keep you from leaving. We don’t believe in vendor lock-in.

“How does this work?”

If you have legacy documentation (InDesign, Word, PDF), we’ll convert it to a web-ready format (Markdown), add image links, metadata, etc. Markdown is converted to valid, semantic HTML, which can be published on your own site or hosted at Specs and Docs. Clean, print-friendly PDFs can be created server-side or by end users. That’s it. 😊

“How is this better than other technical publishing solutions?”

Our web manuals are valid HTML documents that can be read on any device, supporting screen readers and other assistive technology for disabled users. They are also machine-translatable using both professional translation management systems and client-side (browser) MT, so end users will always have access to translated manuals, while manufacturers save on translation. Documents can also be converted to “classic”, page-based PDFs on the fly and printed as necessary.

“What technology are you using?”

We are using proven off-the-shelf technology (Markdown, Pandoc) and custom components (some JavaScript, fine-tuned HTML templates, and clean style sheets) to create valid, well-structured, streamlined web documents. Enjoy documents that load fast and look great on all kinds of devices.

“Who are your customers?”

We market our solution to the kind of businesses we have been working for for the last thirty years: hi-fi and other consumer equipment brands, music production equipment manufacturers and distributors … but we’re also open to new markets and challenges.

If you sell consumer electronics, AV / MI equipment, and you want to reach audiences all over the world with well-designed product literature that’s easy to write, publish, read, and translate, we can help.

↻ 2025-11-20