I'd Rather Be Writing » Flare

Messages from Sponsors — January 2012

Tom Johnson — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:06:06 +0000

Below are a few messages from my blog’s sponsors. Check them out and see if any interest you. Many of them have upcoming webinars.

News from Madcap

MadCap Software is pleased to present free live webinars from industry experts covering a variety of topics essential for today’s technical writers. Sign up today to advance your professional skills and learn about the latest trends in technical communication.

Moving from FrameMaker to Flare | Feb 7, 10:00-11:00 am (Pacific Time)

Are you using FrameMaker as your primary authoring tool? While Frame is great for book publishing, it requires separate tools and plug-ins to single source content for the web. If you are tired of the expense and the headache of using multiple tools, consider switching to MadCap Flare.

Flare matches and exceeds FrameMaker’s best features, including variables, snippets (equivalent to text insets), conditions, and versatile cross-referencing formats. And Flare doesn’t restrict you to a linear, book-based model. You can manage content at the topic level and build multi-sectioned, double-sided books or websites and knowledge bases. Your choice.

Join Eddie VanArsdall as he demonstrates how you can adapt your FrameMaker workflow to a full-on, single-sourcing solution with one tool: MadCap Flare.

Presenter: Eddie VanArsdall, Content Strategist / Technical Writer

Making Your Content Mobile | Feb 23, 10:00-11:00 am (Pacific Time)

This webinar will provide an industry overview of moving different types of content to the mobile environment. Specifically, it will cover developing the following for the mobile environment: (1) HTML content, (2) PDF documents, (3) WebHelp, (4) e-books, and (5) e-learning courses.

Join Nad Rosenberg as she discuss technical issues, usability, and legibility as well as unique problems and solutions.

Presenter: Nad Rosenberg, President, TechWRITE, Inc.

Importing Microsoft Word Files into MadCap Flare Projects | Mar 19, 11:00-12:00 pm (Pacific Time)

Need to import Word files into a Flare project but you’re not sure what Flare’s Word import options do? Or why old and, apparently, well-behaved Word files give odd results when imported into Flare? This webinar addresses both questions.

Flare has a powerful set of Word import features that let you automatically break Word files into topics on import, specify style equivalents between Word and Flare (called “mapping”), and more.

Join Neil Perlin, MadCap-Certified Flare and Mimic instructor and consultant, in this webinar that walks through the process of importing Word files into Flare. We’ll look at the mechanics of the process and discuss the kinds of problems that occur in Word files and what to do to fix them.

Presenter: Neil Perlin, Flare Consultant, Content Strategist, Mobile Developer, Hyper/Word Services

For more information on our live and recorded webinars, please visit:

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/demos/webinars.aspx

News from Dr. Explain

Dr.Explain 4.5 Automates Help File Creation

Unique to Dr.Explain is its innovative approach to creating help documentation much quicker than with other tools. The program parses a live application and automatically produces screenshots of its windows along with a sequence of explanatory callouts for each control.

Watch the video press release about new features of Dr.Explain 4.5:

Annotation Template Editor is one of the coolest new features of the new release. It allows to create callouts of any design, complexity & style. Now you can prepare amazing annotated screenshots and graphics and insert it into your help documentation in a single tool. Dr.Explain produces documentation in the HTML (on-line manuals), CHM (MS Windows® help files), RTF, and PDF formats from a single source.

More information on Dr.Explain: http://www.drexplain.com.

Download a free trial: http://www.drexplain.com/download/. A free license for reviewers, editors and bloggers is provided on request.

News from Scriptorium

Thinking about content strategy? Check out Scriptorium’s latest webcast recording:
http://www.scriptorium.com/2012/01/webcast-content-strategy-in-technical-communication/

Coming attractions:

January 31: Webcast on trends in technical communication with special guest Char James-Tanny
February 15: Webcast on HTML5 with guest presenter Peter Lubbers
Week of February 22: Simon Bate presents at tcworld India; Sarah O’Keefe presents at Intelligent Content

Review the entire events list

News from Tedopres

We are doing a few webinars in the next few weeks.

Join our FREE webinar on Simplified Technical English
Clear & consistent content can help you save cost & improve your customer experience

Tuesday, January 31, 2012
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM EST

Visit Tedopres.com or register at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/510570974.

Join us for a Free Webinar to learn about STE Tools
Reaping the benefits from your Simplified Technical English implementation.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012
4:00 – 5:00 PM EST

Visit Tedopres.com or register at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/604631086

Provide your end user with the right information at the right time.
How you can use Augmented Reality and make your product information interactively available on an iPad. Read more at http://tedopres.com/HyperSIS-Service-Information-System.

News from Adobe

Switch from MadCap Flare, Author-it, or Doc-To-Help Enterprise, or Doc-To-Help for Word and save 40% off Adobe RoboHelp 9!

Struggling with you current Help Authoring Tool? Looking to “switch” to a tried-and-tested tool that has been the professional standard in the user assistance space for the last 20 years? Adobe has the answer … and the perfect reasons too!

Adobe celebrates the 20th anniversary of RoboHelp with a limited period 40% off “switcher” promotion. Switch from MadCap Flare, Author-it, or Doc-To-Help Enterprise or Doc-To-Help for Word and save 40% off Adobe RoboHelp 9!

Time frame: October 17th 2011 through February 16th 2012
Scope: US only

For more details (top reasons to switch, testimonials, switching resources) about the RoboHelp 40% off “switcher” promotion, see the following:

Saibal Bhattacharjee
Product Marketing Manager
Adobe Systems Inc.,
saibal@adobe.com

Tom Deem
Business Development Manager
Adobe Systems Inc.,
tdeem@adobe.com

Blog Sponsors

What Tools Do Technical Writers Use

Tom Johnson — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:33:14 +0000

Students and others trying to break into technical writing are always wondering what tools they should use. The latest tools survey from WritersUA seems helpful in answering this question.

The survey concludes that some of the most popular tools for technical writers are Adobe Acrobat, Camtasia Studio, Adobe Captivate, Dreamweaver, Madcap Flare, Framemaker, Photoshop, Robohelp, Snagit, and Visio.

Of these tools, Flare scores highest as a tool that participants can’t live without. They ranked it as a 5, meaning “very important.” Presumably this is because Flare does an excellent job in single sourcing to other formats, such as print and mobile. It’s an all-in-one solution, so it by definition it’s important or you’re not using the tool correctly.

The WritersUA survey is a little frustrating because these tools aren’t grouped by category. Some are screen capture tools, others are PDF conversion tools, others are image editing tools, others are video recording tools. I use Photoshop and Snagit, but ranking these along with Robohelp and Flare is to compare apples to oranges. Similarly, Camtasia Studio and Captivate are in another category. It would be helpful to sort the tools by category. (Still, it’s nice to see someone doing a tools survey in the first place.)

Of the help authoring tools, it’s interesting to see Flare rank so high. Flare is an excellent help authoring tool, and with a knowledge of CSS you can completely customize the webhelp and print output to look professional. However, its main failure is the lack of collaborative authoring. If you have 15 writers all contributing to the same help project, you have to import the content from other authors. They can use supporting tools such as Madcap Contribute, or Word templates. You can also try hosting Flare on SharePoint and enabling collaboration this way.

But I’m guessing that Flare is popular because most technical writers are solo sailors on their own ship, without the need for collaboration from other writers. In my career, the number of collaborative projects has been very small. I am usually the only writer for the project, which means collaborative authoring is unimportant. I don’t need a central repository installed on a server that numerous authors can access and pull content from. Content is also not reused between projects, since each documentation project covers a different product.

Sarah O’Keefe also has some comments on the WritersUA tools survey. See her post, The passion quotient. She notes that the survey highlights “the tool for which the importance is ranked the highest.” Despite this criteria in evaluation, I am not sure how I would design the tools survey differently.

Blog Sponsors

Messages from My Tech Comm Sponsors — November 2011

Tom Johnson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:46:00 +0000

Each technical communication conference I attend, one of the activities that attendees look forward to is strolling through the exhibit hall, perusing the various tech comm booths, picking up freebies and fliers, listening to vendor pitches, and generally taking in the tech comm world of products.

With that in mind, and as an opportunity to give more visibility to my sponsors, I offer a regular “Message from the Sponsors” post. I give each sponsor the opportunity to let my readers know about their products and services. I hope you can think of this post as similar to strolling down a virtual conference exhibit hall (at least a little bit).

Clarify: Image capture, Image editing and Document Authoring – Together at Last

So many of us have suffered through the tedious process of capturing screenshots and posting them into Word or some other text editor. When you’re trying to communicate quickly, this can be like flying down the highway only to get stuck in the worst Los Angeles traffic imaginable.

Clarify removes the traffic jam. With fast and flexible screen capture tools, you can quickly grab multiple images. As you capture the images, Clarify creates a document for you. Everything you need to author your document is right there, including text entry and image annotation tools, such as arrows, boxes, blur, highlight, borders, image resizing, and cropping.

Clarify is great for banging out a quick how-to, providing fast revision notes to a colleague, or for providing application feedback for developers. And at just $29.99, it’s extremely affordable. Clarify is available for both Windows and Mac.

Download a free 14-day trial and see how much more productive you can be when working with an integrated screen capture, image-editing, and document-authoring tool.

Learn about content strategy in technical communication with Scriptorium at LavaCon

Ryan Fulcher, Alan Pringle, and Sarah O’Keefe will be attending LavaCon next week with free chocolate (of course!). Stop by our booth and don’t miss Sarah’s session on content strategy in technical communication. We look forward to seeing you there, or on our next round of webcasts! (Note: After our move, our direct phone numbers changed. Please contact us via 919-481-2701 or 866-605-9677.) For more information about Scriptorium, see http://www.scriptorium.com.

Controlled English with Congree – the New Standard in Technical Writing

Congree is the world’s premier controlled-English authoring assistance software. Working as a plugin to a variety of editing tools, including JustSystems XMetaL, Congree helps you leverage on sentences you and your team have already written, unify your abbreviations, terminology, and acronym usage, and ensure that everything you write conforms to your corporate style guide. Congree functions as a simple plugin, and is both customizable and extremely easy to use. Get the most out of your XML authoring with Congree. Please join our joint webinar with JustSystems on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 by following this link.

Dr.Explain 4.5 released

A new version of likely the most eccentric help file authoring tool, Dr.Explain, has been recently released. A free demo copy of Dr.Explain 4.5 is available at http://www.drexplain.com/download.

Dr.Explain 4.5 update includes about 200 improvements, features, and optimizations in total.

For more info about the Dr.Explain help file and on-line manual authoring tool, see http://www.drexplain.com.

Tedopres International – www.tedopres.com

Also known as Simplified English, the main objective of a controlled language is to make technical text easy to understand. Tedopres HyperSTE standardizes vocabulary and style according to linguistic style guides and standards like Simplified Technical English, aiming to improve consistency, eliminate ambiguity and reduce complexity. It also provides objective criteria for quality control. Controlled Language includes a general dictionary and a set of writing rules. In addition to the general vocabulary, companies can define their own Technical Names (terminology).

A few benefits of controlled authoring include:

Quality assurance and improvement
Standardized way of writing
Improved safety
Efficient authoring
Reduced time to market
Improved customer experience
Facilitates XML, content management, structured authoring (Information Mapping,DITA, S1000D)
Considerable cost savings
Cheaper, faster and better translations

For more information, see www.simplifiedenglish.net.

You can also learn about controlled authoring with Tedopres’ HyperSTE at LavaCon. Join Tedopres at LavaCon, November 13–16, 2011, Austin, TX, where Berry Braster (Sales & Marketing Director and implementation expert) will be speaking in a panel discussion titled, “Controlled Language – Making it work for you!” The panel discussion will include Kit Brown-Hoekstra of Comgenesis (she will moderate the panel), Sherri Sotnick of Elekta (who implemented Elekta Approved Simplified English), Berry Braster of Tedopres (implementation expert) and Poppy Quintal (standard expert). For more information on Lavacon, please visit http://lavacon.org. Please contact us to be eligible for discount coupons. For more information, please contact us at ste@tedopres.com.

To learn more about TedoPres, see www.tedopres.com

Adobe Celebrates the 20th Anniversary of RoboHelp with a Limited Period 40% Off “Switcher” Promotion

Struggling with your current help authoring tool? Looking to “switch” to a tried-and-tested tool, one that has been the professional standard in the user assistance space for the last 20 years? Adobe has the answer … and the perfect reasons too!

Time frame: October 17th 2011 through February 16th 2012
Scope: US only

For more details (top reasons to switch, testimonials, switching resources) about the RoboHelp 40% off “switcher” promotion, please visit http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/switch.html

To learn more, please sign up for the upcoming Adobe RoboHelp “Switcher” webinar at 10.00 am PST on 30th November (Wednesday).

Information Design online grad programs at Southern Polytechnic

Life is full of choices. So why choose Southern Polytechnic’s online graduate programs in technical communication and information design and communication?

Because we’ve been in the “business” of teaching online for years, so we have the hard stuff down, and our MS degree has been around since 1988–yikes! Almost before the Internet (well, not quite). Nowadays, we have an online graduate certificate in tech communication, four advanced certificates, and the full MS in Information Design and Communication, all online.

We’ve got great grad faculty who practice what we teach, who engage with you in a combination of weekly discussions (asynchronous so you can communicate even in your bunny slippers, if that’s what works best for you), and weekly projects that grow to bigger projects, both individual and team-based. The result: you learn by doing, by sharing, and by producing and you build a great portfolio of your products to take to market.

For more about our programs, visit us at idc.spsu.edu.

New Release: MadCap Mimic 6

MadCap Software is pleased to announce the release of Mimic 6, for software simulations and tutorials.

New features in Mimic 6 include:

Audio Narration
Audio Objects
Improved Recording Workflow
Flash Embedded Skin Enhancements
Flare 7 Integration
And Much More

Watch the What’s New video here:
http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/mimic/overview.aspx#whatsnew

To learn more about Mimic, visit:
http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/mimic/

Upcoming Webinar: Strategies for Building and Managing Large Online Libraries – Nov. 30, 10am (Pacific)

In this webinar, learn some key methodologies for starting a large project, gaining client/employer consensus, and making your way from ground zero to useable, accessible procedures. These solid practices will help you regardless of the help authoring tool you have selected.

Presenter: Beth Gerber, Lightext, Inc.

For more information on upcoming webinars, and past webinar recordings, visit:
http://www.madcapsoftware.com/demos/webinars.aspx

Competitive Upgrade Pricing on MadCap Flare, MadPak

The reasons to switch to MadCap Flare from other tools such as RoboHelp® and FrameMaker® are growing.

As the original creators of RoboHelp®, the team at MadCap Software developed Flare from the ground up, using the latest technologies, with the vision to create the most advanced single-source, multi-channel publishing application on the market. Now in its 7th release, Flare boasts an impressive list of features and functionality.

Flare was the first to introduce features such as native mobile output, and to launch a complete suite of fully integrated tools to support the entire authoring, contribution, review and localization process.

Users switching from other legacy tools can save up to 50%.

For more information about switching to Flare, including case studies, white papers and transition guides, visit:
http://madcap.us/uKEjBT

—————————–

If you’re interested in getting your message out to technical communicators, let me know.

Blog Sponsors

Second-Level Faceted Navigation [Organizing Content 8]

Tom Johnson — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:31:01 +0000

In my previous post, I introduced faceted classification and faceted navigation as alternative methods for organizing help content. In contrast to topic-based hierarchies, faceted navigation provides multiple paths into the same content. These multiple paths increase the likelihood that users find the right content.

Peter Morville and Jeffery Callendar, two information architects, call faceted navigation “arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade.” Because of its importance in content findability, one aspect I want to now explore further is a second-level faceted browsing system.

Second-level facets help increase the “scent of information,” as information designers call it. Like animals sensing the signs of their prey, users stalking content feel motivated to keep looking if they see signs that they’re “getting warmer,” as Jakob Nielsen puts it. Second-tier facets provide signs that the user is getting closer to making a kill.

In the following diagram, the user has landed on a topic. The user may have searched for “going on undercover operation” to find the topic. Or the user may have browsed to this topic through one of the first-level facets on the left.

It’s not quite the right topic, but the result tells the user he or she is on the right track, since it does address undercover operations. Now the user can refine the selection by choosing one of the second-level facets below the topic.

Second level faceted navigation

Here second-level facets can be powerful. In the above example, I chose to include the following:

See topics related to undercover operations
See topics related to tropical areas.
See probable next steps.
See videos about undercover operations.
See most popular topics related to undercover operations.
See diagrams about undercover operations.

I could add more facets as appropriate. For example, since the topic addresses weaponry, I could add “See topics relating to weaponry,” and so on. Cross-references within the topics also provide second-level navigation. Using one of these second-level facets, the user can refine his or her search for the right information.

For more examples of faceted browsing, see cokeonshelf’s Flickr photostream.

How You Create Second-Level Facets

The technical steps for creating second-level facets depend on the help authoring tool you’re using. In Flare, you can add a concept to topics (similar to how you can add tags or categories to posts in WordPress). Once you have added concepts to your topics, you can then insert a concept help control in a topic.

In the help control’s settings, you can choose to show all topics tagged with the same concept. You can also add a style class for the link so that it doesn’t simply say “See also,” but rather has more customized text. Essentially you can tag your topics and then show a list of those tagged topics wherever you want them to appear.

Note: I recommend customizing the “See also” text with more specifics. I once conducted some usability testing with an intern. As the intern scanned the help for information, I asked him why he didn’t click the “See also” links at the bottom of the topics. He replied that he has never found that kind of link helpful, so he assumed it would be likewise useless in my help file. If you change the names of these links to something unique to the topic the link appears on, you can decrease the likelihood that the user will dismiss the link out of poor previous experiences.

How Many Second-Level Facets?

How many second-level facets should you provide: You can provide as many custom groupings of help topics as you think may be useful. But keep in mind the tradeoffs of complexity with usability. Mike Padilla notes that as you add more power and control in the faceted filters, you end up with a more confusing navigation. Choosing multiple filters to string together complex AND/OR statements may tax the user too much. If the user doesn’t choose the right options in the right combinations, he or she may not get any results at all.

Remember that Facets Aren’t Just Topics

Today I stumbled across a help site that uses categories to organize the help content. It’s a simple little help file that seems to start out well, but ultimately feels flat because it doesn’t provide a starting point for new users, nor does it provide a second-level of navigation. It ends up presenting a topic-based navigation without any hierarchy.

Flat navigation that doesn't go beyond topics

The help system is based on WordPress, which provides a lot of navigational tools, but beyond the first facet of navigation, there are no more facets. The topics are simply labeled with a category and arranged in alphabetical order. When you click a category, the help topics for that category appear in reverse chronological order. That’s it.

How could the user improve the findability in this help system? How could a system of second-level facets increase the scent of information?

First, the navigation could provide a starting point for new users. Listing topics in alphabetical order is almost the worst arrangement you can choose. Why not create a new category called “Just the Basics,” intended for beginners? Then add only those topics that newbies would need to read — and add them in sequential rather than ordering by date or alphabet.

How about adding a “Most Popular” category so that users can discover answers to common questions? The help author could also group by role, area, as well as by help format.

To be even more useful, if I choose “Creating/Managing a Profile,” wouldn’t it be nice to show a list of more specific tags in the sidebar as I drill into that category?

Tags could include more specific topics, as well as other terms such as photos, social media sites, address, email address, etc, to describe the content. I could then narrow the information more to find exactly what I’m looking for. In this model, categories would then be the first-level facet, while tags would be the second-level facet.

The Universal Need to Narrow

Part of the appeal of faceted search is that it “addresses the universal need to narrow,” according to Morville and Callender. This is why it’s important not to just leave facets at the first level, but to provide navigational points at the second level as well.

Different tools (for example, Flare versus WordPress) require you to implement the facets a bit differently, but the overall idea is the same: as the user drills into the content, you provide a more narrow set of filters to allow the user to refine the information.

Blog Sponsors

Trending Towards Mobile: Neil Perlin at the STC Summit #stc10

Tom Johnson — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:08:32 +0000

In this videocast, I talk with Neil Perlin at hyperword.com about the trend toward mobile outputs for help and other information deliverables. Neil had just given a demonstration of a mobile output from Flare, and he mentioned to me that mobile was a direction he wants to specialize in. We recorded this video in the Expo hall at the STC Summit in Dallas.

Blog Sponsors

Message from the Sponsors (April 27, 2010)

Tom Johnson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:38:44 +0000

MadCap Software

Thinking Windows, a leading provider of billing software solutions for Australian water authorities, has long embraced MadCap Flare’s single-source publishing to improve efficiencies and eliminate redundancies. But it also uses Flare for its new device-agnostic mobile output — and recently was able to deliver online Help to GPS-enabled mobile devices around Australia in less than 30 days.

“We have long recognized the importance of delivering online documentation to an increasingly mobile workforce,” says Stephen Tearle, director of Thinking Windows. “With Flare 6, for the first time there is a technical communication product on the market for device-agnostic, single-source publishing to handheld and mobile devices. Now instead of carrying around instructional cards, the field operators have easy Web access to the information they need.”

Read the full case study here: Thinking Windows Delivers Mobile Web Help in Less Than 30 Days with MadCap Flare

Scriptorium

Sarah O’Keefe and Matt Arnold will be representing Scriptorium at the STC Summit in Dallas next week. If you’re attending the conference, be sure to visit our booth to meet Sarah and Matt, pick up some chocolate, and get a free copy of our updated white paper compilation, The Compass (while supplies last).

If you’re not attending the STC Summit, you still have a chance to pick up conference swag from us by visiting our virtual booth—a short survey that asks the same questions we ask conference attendees. During the survey, you can also ask us questions about any challenges you’re facing with developing and distributing technical content.

Complete the survey by May 5th (the day the STC Summit ends), and we’ll enter you into a drawing to win one of six copies of The Compass—and the winners get some chocolate, too. No Scriptorium conference booth would be complete without chocolate!

SnagIt

Capture anything you see on the screen. Edit and combine those captures. Share them via your favorite applications. Organize and find them again later. The more you use SnagIt, the more ways you’ll find to use it!

Want to get a laugh? Add a speech balloon to that photo of your cat and fire it off in an instant message.

Need to make an impression at work? Capture that sales chart and point out important details with a sleek-looking arrow. SnagIt can turn a simple screenshot into a powerful information graphic.

SnagIt is versatile, yet surprisingly simple! As one SnagIt user said, “It’s as basic or as powerful as you need it to be.”

Maybe that’s why millions of people worldwide love using SnagIt, in a million different ways.

Learn more and download a free 30-day trial of Snagit at: www.techsmith.com/snagit.asp.

Blog Sponsors

Message from the Sponsors — March 30

Tom Johnson — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 01:07:27 +0000

Last month I started a regular message from the sponsors post as a way to give my advertisers more visibility. Here’s the second sponsor post. Lots of good information in here.

Dr.Explain 4.0 Enables Rapid Creation of Software Help Systems to Speed up Software Rollouts

Indigo Byte Systems, LLC today introduces Dr.Explain 4.0, the most significant release of its innovative help authoring software, with over 10 new features and enhancements, including improved interface usability, customizable page layout, visual styles, on-demand screenshot annotating mode, search and index functionality in HTML manuals, PDF output and more. New Dr.Explain makes it even easier and faster to document software, ensuring faster software rollouts. The new version is available as a free trial from http://www.drexplain.com.

Unique to Dr.Explain is its innovative approach to making help documentation much quicker than it is with other tools. The program parses a live application and automatically produces screenshots of its windows along with a sequence of explanatory callouts for each control. The process is accurate and fully automated, so the user only has to enter a description for each callout. The project can be exported to HTML, CHM Help, RTF or PDF format.

Dr.Explain 4.0 includes but is not limited to the following key new features:

Improved usability: The newest version introduces a wide work area, sleek icons and slim toolbars, contributing to increased user satisfaction.

Customizable look: In the new version, the user can rearrange objects and change layout page content remarkably easily in the editor.

On-demand screenshot annotating mode: The workspace area is grabbed only when required. The floating panels will help the user to organize the workspace layout as needed.

Search and Index in HTML manuals: This feature doesn’t require scripting capabilities on a server and may be used even on websites with free hosting.

PDF output: Now the user can export help documentation to Adobe PDF with support for national characters, images, hyperlinks, bookmarks and table of contents.

A downloadable trial version is available at http://www.drexplain.com/download/

The program comes with “Compatible with Windows 7″ logo.

More information is available at http://www.drexplain.com

P.S.: A free serial number for Dr.Explain 4.0 is provided to magazine editors, internet columnists, bloggers and webmasters who intend to write a review of the program on their website, blog or column. Email info@drexplain.com for details.

SnagIt | Capture your digital lifestyle

Want to get a laugh? Add a speech balloon to that photo of your cat and fire it off in an instant message.

Need to make an impression at work? Capture that sales chart and point out important details with a sleek-looking arrow. SnagIt can turn a simple screenshot into a powerful information graphic.

SnagIt is versatile, yet surprisingly simple! As one SnagIt user said, “It’s as basic or as powerful as you need it to be.”

Maybe that’s why millions of people worldwide love using SnagIt, in a million different ways.

Learn more and download a free 30-day trial of Snagit at: www.techsmith.com/snagit.asp.

Scriptorium.com

Still interested in DITA? Next up in Scriptorium’s ongoing series of free webcasts on DITA-related tools and technologies is an XMetaL 6 overview on April 21, 2010. Presented by Simon Bate, this webcast demonstrates the DITA features in the XMetaL 6 editor. For more information and to register, visit our website: http://www.scriptorium.com/events.

Meet us at the Summit. Scriptorium’s Sarah O’Keefe and Matthew Arnold will be presenting/exhibiting at the STC Summit in Dallas on May 2–5. Sarah will be presenting on “Managing in an XML Environment.” Stop by our booth, #113, on Sunday between 6:45 PM and 8:00 PM, Monday between 10:30 AM and 6:15 PM, or Tuesday between 9:00 AM and 5:30 PM. If you’d like to schedule some time with Sarah or Matt, email info@scriptorium.com and we’ll set something up.

Scriptorium Publishing provides expert advice on how to develop, deploy, and manage content. If you are facing a difficult publishing challenge, we want to hear from you. Contact us at info@scriptorium.com or 919-481-2701 x105.

MadCap Flare the Authoring Tool of Choice for Carnegie Mellon University

MadCap Software was pleased to announce its latest case study highlighting how Carnegie Mellon University uses MadCap Flare to teach students documentation best practices. “In the past, students mocked up their online Help in HTML. It was extremely labor-intensive, and it didnʼt give them the practical experience of using an authoring tool,” said Tracey DePellegrin Connelly. “With Flare, the difference is night and day between what they were doing before and what they are now able to learn. Itʼs been an extremely valuable tool for giving our students real-world experience.”

“It can be hard to grasp the separation of content and formatting within a structured authoring environment if you are used to working with word processing and authoring packages where the formatting is applied directly to the content,” said Ms. Ciroli. “Flare did a nice job of bridging that gap. Our students liked that they didnʼt have to worry about formatting, as well as how easy it was to set up the online Help navigation using the indexing and glossary features in Flare. Whether they were technically savvy or not, all the students could get the output they needed.”

Read more about Flare and Carnegie Mellon University.

Flare 6 Allows Users to Work Smarter, More Efﬁciently When Reusing Content, Publishing to Multiple Outputs

File tagging and the WebHelp mobile output are among top of the list of favorite new features in Flare 6. “Flare’s new features and user interface improvements have been helping me work smarter, faster, and with better results. I’m especially pleased to see File Tags and the new WebHelp Mobile target,” says Nita Beck.

Flareʼs single-sourcing allows users to save time when creating the mobile output. They simply create a new output target in an existing Flare project and content can be immediately available to users on the go. Neil Perlin of Hyper/Word Services says, “This feature takes what was a separate process requiring different tools and skills and starts to make it just one more Flare output. I expect that more developers will try outputting to mobile devices now that it’s easier and more convenient to do so with Flare.”

Learn more about Flare’s new features. For an independent review of MadCap Flare 6, read Paul Pehrsonʼs blog.

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Madcap Flare’s Extensibility: Adding jQuery to Flare

Tom Johnson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:45:44 +0000

Alistair Christie recently published a podcast about Unscripted Screencasts and Flare Extensibility. In the podcast, he considers whether scripts are necessary for corporate screencasts – a good topic for exploration and testing. But he also gets into something a little more interesting: extending Flare with jQuery.

jQuery is the new Javascript. It provides smooth functionality that shows and hides components, slides objects around, and animates graphics in a sexy way. As an example, ProPhotoBlogs’ support section incorporates jQuery functionality. And the drop-down menus on Will Sansbury’s site are also jQuery driven. Here are a few jQuery animation effects. And slide-down effects. And fade effects.

Alistair says he feels satisfied he made the right choice about adopting Flare as a help tool because of this extensibility. Because of the XML and CSS standards that Flare is built on, Alistair can add a reference to the jQuery script in the header, add functions in the page body and toolbar, and hook into other technologies to customize the display.

For detailed step-by-step instructions on inserting functions into Flare’s Webhelp toolbar, see Alistair’s post, Adding function buttons to to the Madcap Flare Web Toolbar.

I like Flare for much of the same reasons as Alistair. I haven’t integrated jQuery scripts into Flare yet. But knowing that I can do it if I wanted to is encouraging.

The next question is what functionality we’re missing from Webhelp. Is jQuery just the latest gee-whiz, bell-and-whistle technology? Or is it functionality that will persuade users that the help is worthwhile?

Alistair says he created a button that shows a direct link to the topic the user is viewing. And he hooked into a custom glossary database. He also integrated his own show/hide functionality and a bookmarks feature. Granted, some of that functionality already exists to some degree in the existing Webhelp buttons, but Alistair’s company had custom needs.

One button I’ve added to Webhelp is a Contact button that allows the user to send feedback to the project team. I would like to incorporate jQuery scripts to make screencasts pop-up in a modal that dims the background. I’d also like to make screenshots expand to full size when the user clicks them (similar to Flare’s new thumbnail feature). The way graphics slide down smoothly with jQuery is more elegant than the built-in drop-down hotspot functionality Flare provides. (I imagine you have to work in the code view to integrate all of this.)

I’m not sure to what extent other tools can hook into the same technologies. But it is important to have this potential — so that help authors can keep pace with the developments and technologies of the web.

To listen to Alistair Christie’s podcast on extending Flare with jQuery, see Unscripted Screencasts and Flare Extensibility.

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DITA Features in Madcap Flare Webcast Tuesday at 11 a.m. EST from Scriptorium

Tom Johnson — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:23:49 +0000

Scriptorium is presenting a free webinar on the DITA features in Madcap Flare this Tuesday at 11 a.m. EST. Here are the details:

Presented by Sarah O’Keefe, this webcast demonstrates using MadCap Flare to create WebHelp from DITA-based content. Topics covered include:

Importing DITA content into Flare

Map file handling

Cross-references and links

Relationship tables

Conrefs

Conditional processing

By the way, you can keep up with other upcoming webcasts from Scriptorium by subscribing their newsletter, keeping up with their site’s feed, or clicking the Scriptorium graphic in my sidebar.

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Why Help Authoring Tools Will Fade

Tom Johnson — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:30:26 +0000

I read a blog post the other day that I can’t stop thinking about. In the Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt writes,

The main issue for me is between authoring static in-house documents using single-sourcing methods before publishing, or capturing information sources dynamically after publishing from online social networks, linked data sources, and knowledge mashups.

The myth of single-source authoring is that it actually has a life in the future and remains a viable goal for many information developers. With so many mega-trends against it—such as the belief that static authoring from a single vantage point from a single author paid by a single organization is a workable system—seems ludicrous. Instead, we should be looking to capture, sequence, and give context to the wealth of rich content already published in context from the Web. Collaborating with the many subject experts, authors, videographers, bloggers, tweeters, and writers coming together on the Web with shared interests will be powerful if it can be harnessed.

The myth of single sourcing

Michael undercuts the idea that you can create help from a single author working from a single perspective in a single point in the organization. To add to this scenario, usually that author is an outsider to both the environment and business processes he or she is documenting. Further, the author usually moves on to another project as soon as the software is released.

This morning I had a meeting downtown at SLC headquarters. I’ve become accustomed to wearing business casual clothes to work, but at headquarters, I have to wear a full suit because that’s the dress code. In an early morning meeting, I listened to several department leads explain my new project. It would involve extensive knowledge of cataloging and archiving techniques, a robust off-the-shelf system that had been customized, five main divisions or modules to conquer, each with their own resource leads, about 200 constantly rotating users complementing a core group of specialists, and an aggressive time frame.

As I listened and glanced through the archiving and cataloging procedures (did you know there’s a Society of American Archivists, and that they have in-depth protocols for how things should be done?), I realized that learning the business process surrounding the application would require complete immersion in each of the five divisions over the course of several months. I would need to constantly interview subject matter experts, participate in the actual archiving and cataloging processes, and make sure everything I created was reviewed, checked, and edited for accuracy by each of the five major subject matter experts. The end documentation would probably be several hundred pages for the initial release.

Keep in mind that I have about three other concurrent projects that I’m working on with approaching deadlines (unlike developers, no writer ever gets to work on just one project). Could I pull something together by February/March?

At this point, Michael’s post was resonating like a blinking banner in my head. Authoring from a single vantage point from a single author is … ludicrous.

Even if I were to import existing documents and materials from SMEs into a HAT, who would own it after I finished? Would I become a permanent installation in the department, constantly processing updates, verifying instructional clarity, addressing gaps and making edits? If not, would the documentation become stale six months after release, when SMEs decided to change their business processes?

In an organization where several thousand people have only a handful of actual technical writers, we’re a scarce resource. I bounce from project to project, like a little visiting angel (or devil) who works a little documentation magic and then moves on.

Another group on my team is tackling an even larger project, one that involves complex financials. They’re using Flare. They started using X-Edit and entitled a handful of business writers to contribute content with it, but X-Edit proved either too buggy or unworkable. Now the business SMEs are passing Word documents to the guys with Flare, who are inputting the information into the HAT. After release, the idea is to have the business department own the documentation and continue making updates using Flare. It will be interesting to see if they actually do it.

In thinking about these robust software scenarios, where products require extensive knowledge of business processes, have elaborate interfaces with hundreds of possible tasks, and are run by dozens of specialists constantly refining their own business processes, is there any other platform besides a wiki that can actually work? What else can you use to enable 10 different authors to make simultaneous updates, to maintain the documentation after the release? How else can you infuse the documentation with the intricacies of a department’s business processes?

Using any of the standard authoring tools — Flare, RoboHelp, Author-It, Doc-to-Help — leaves you with the ridiculous model of a single author working from a single vantage point from a single organization trying to pull together an ocean of information. Because that model is untenable and unscalable, HATs will fade in favor of collaborative web-based authoring technologies.

Note: Stay tuned for more on this topic. I’m interviewing Michael for a podcast this weekend. It turns out he practically lives in my backyard.

WordPress note for Thanksgiving: Remember that I do WordPress consulting, including design, development, and implementation of WordPress sites. Thanksgiving is a perfect weekend to get your blog online. If you need my help, contact me. Even if it’s only a small site tweak, such as changing font sizes or integrating Share This buttons, I can help you out.