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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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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, 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

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

Blog Sponsors

Arguments for and Against Tripane Help

Tom Johnson — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:27:43 +0000

My colleague Ben Minson wrote a post about why tripane help is a relic of the book-paradigm documentation age, and how it can limit us from taking advantage of other web technologies. See Why I Don’t Like Tri-pane Help.

As a quick definition, tripane help is the standard webhelp HTML output that has several frames — the table of contents pane on the left, the main topic area in the middle, and a pane across the top. For example, here’s a sample tripane help I created a couple of years ago for WordPress:

This is an example of tripane help. It's all a giant frameset, with the table of contents on the left, a navigation bar across the top, and content in the middle. That's three panes -- hence the name, tripane help.

I agree with Ben’s arguments that discourage tripane help, and yesterday I even wrote somewhat of draft rant titled “Rest in Peace, Tripane Help.” But as it was still in draft mode, I mulled it over. I also listened to a Scriptorium webinar on DITA Best Practices by Tony Self, which helped me see another side of the argument. In this post, I want to present a more balanced argument for and against tripane help.

Cons of Tripane Help

Let’s start with the cons of tripane help.

Hard to modify. Have you ever tried to modify the look, feel, or functionality of tripane help? It’s usually a complicated undergrowth of impenetrable frames and custom code. Hacking RoboHelp’s webhelp, for example, requires you to dive into arcane tips and tricks from sites such as Rick Stone’s RoboWizard, which still looks, with its outer space background, like websites did back in 1995. Rick’s site itself is an example of tripane help.

Rest in Peace, Tripane Help

Flare gives you finite control over the style of each element, but not over the larger structural elements. What if I don’t want frames? What if I want the main search engine on the home page? What if I want the sidebar on the right, with drop-down submenus that slide out? Why can’t I just code it with a separate CSS file from scratch like a regular website, choosing what I float, choosing the behavior of my navigation buttons, etc?

Overall, tripane help is hard to modify because of the extensive frameset and proprietary code.

Looks outdated. Although you can tweak its styles here and there, you can’t make tripane help look like a regular website. It just doesn’t fit in with anything on the web that you find post-2005.

The more we move into the future of the web, the greater the divide grows between tech comm and interaction design. That divide worries me. When people see a tripane help site open up, it immediately signals a sense of outdatedness.

Lacks web functionality. It’s not just about the limitations of tripane help’s look and feel, though. It’s also about web functionality: RSS feeds, comments, embedded videos, lightboxes, jQuery effects, real-time editing, browser-based authoring, built-in metrics, category links, tags and tag clouds, most popular articles, faceted browsing, instant search, search engine optimization, threaded conversations, and so on. You don’t get hardly any of this with tripane help. Ouch.

By confining our HTML deliverable to the rigid tripane help, we become distanced from the forward movement of the web. We become publishers of HTML content but without any of the slick knowledge of web design or interaction design.

Keeps you in book paradigm mode. As Ben points out, we also get stuck in a book paradigm mode, where the only idea we can come up with for organizing our help content is a bunch of topic folders. Ben points out:

One of the limitations of a TOC is that you can display only topic titles. If you set up pathway pages like Redish describes, you can give the reader more guidance. A risk you take with TOCs is that as the user doesn’t find what he wants, he expands more and more books or folders, and he ends up with an overwhelming list of topics. Instead of holding his hand and leading him along, you’ve paralyzed and frustrated him.

In my experience, help authoring tools don’t lend themselves to dynamic Web outputs that allow you set up this kind of guided experience. You could do it, but it’s not supported well out of the box.

Limits your technical creativity. When we get comfortable with a tool that allows us to publish tripane help, we get locked into whatever built-in features and capabilities the help authoring tool allows. Sometimes we can hack in tweaks and other modifications, but it’s usually not worth the hassle. What happens when we want to try leveraging some of the more web-like features to improve our help, such as faceted browsing or instant search? Because we have confined our technical prowess to a specific tool, we’re not equipped to be more creative and innovative with new approaches to help. We become dependent on tool vendors for innovation.

Pros of Tripane Help

Now for the pros of tripane help.

A tripane help output can help us separate content from design. You're free from worrying about matters outside of content. In this sense, tripane help can be liberating. It breaks the chains that hold you back from focusing more on content.

Allows you to focus on content. In the Tony Self DITA webinar, Self stresses that the paradigm of DITA authoring is to separate content from format and design.

In the DITA model, an author creates a standalone topic that is independent of any particular book or format. This standalone topic can be pushed out into any deliverable or any table of contents and stand on its own. Because of this, the DITA writer doesn’t worry about styles or design. The DITA writer can focus on the content, because after all, this is what ultimately matters.

Tripane help allows you to avoid worrying about format and design. You don’t have to consider the details of the CSS and the look and feel of the content in the web output. Someone has already taken care of that. The design has already been created, and you can redirect this effort that you would normally spend on design and apply it to your actual help content (perhaps creating illustrations and other content diagrams, if you still have an itch to design something).

Most users don’t complain about the design of help anyway. They complain about the poor content, right? So doesn’t it make sense to focus on content rather than design?

Allows variety of classification schemes. At first, it seems that you can only create a topic-based hierarchy for your table of contents (TOC) in a tripane help. The tripane help seems to force you into a book paradigm. But this is only convention. You could abandon the traditional TOC approach and instead organize the content by audience, by timeline, by most popular support requests, or some other scheme.

A lot of tools that produce tripane help have tagging, relationship tables, and other techniques for applying non-traditional organizations. In fact, these tools may even make it easier to manipulate the content in alternative ways.

With the robust TOC that tripane help offers, you could build these alternative entry points directly into the TOC, giving users several different ways to navigate the content — by task, by role, by workflow, by popularity, by department, by feature release dates, and so on. Tripane help gives you an easy way to do this, rather than relying on a web team or a JavaScript/interactive designer to help you code these features.

Provides content re-use, localization, single sourcing. Although these benefits aren’t specific to tripane help, using a tool that auto-compiles to a tripane help output usually gives you additional advantages with content re-use, localization, and single sourcing. You can conditionalize content for various role-based, versioned, or beginner/advanced types of guides. You can package all your files up and send them off for translation, and then reimport them. You can single source your content into print and online and mobile deliverables.

Sure, a web 2.0 site looks cooler, but is it worth the sacrifice of content re-use, localization, and single sourcing, which may be much more important for technical documentation needs? All of these additional benefits are usually available if you stick with tripane help instead of abandoning it for a web-based content management system.

Conclusion

One of the potential fixes for the tripane help eyesore, without losing the benefits, is to have the help authoring tool output its content into div tags that you can use to structure and style as you wish. If you can escape the traditional tripane look and generate a more attractive website, you can move towards the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, tripane help has helped contribute to a growing divide between interaction designers and technical writers. So even if you could structure your output with div tags, most technical writers lack these web design skills. They’ve been limping along with the tripane output for so long that even basic HTML is often an unexplored territory.

Additionally, most technical writers aren’t familiar with any other information architecture techniques outside of basic topic-based hierarchies, so they may not feel a need to innovate with alternative organization patterns.

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.

Blog Sponsors

Message from the Sponsors

Tom Johnson — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:34:57 +0000

In an effort to give more visibility and exposure to the companies who advertise on my site, I’m providing a regular “Messages from the Sponsors” post. In this post, I asked my sponsors if they have any messages they would like me to share with my readers. Since it was the first time I asked this, not everyone was ready with content, but two of them (Scriptorium and Madcap Software) did provide messages, which I’ve inserted below.

Scriptorium.com

Interested in DITA? Scriptorium is offering an ongoing series of free webcasts on DITA-related tools and technologies. For more information and to register, visit our website: http://www.scriptorium.com/events.

We recently launched a new set of forums on our web site. Join us to discuss topics of interest to technical communicators—writing, editing, tools, and of course the mandatory gossip board (rumors and innuendos). We invite you to participate with questions and comments—or answers.

Near Seattle? Scriptorium’s Sarah O’Keefe and Simon Bate will be presenting/exhibiting at WritersUA 2010 March 21–24. Simon will be presenting XSL Techniques for XML-to-XML Transformations on Monday at 3:25PM. The WritersUA conference is always an excellent source of information on a wide range of user assistance topics. Stop by our booth on Monday or Tuesday. The exhibition is open from 8:00AM to 6:00PM on Monday and again from 8:00AM to 5:30PM on Tuesday. If you’d like to schedule some time with Sarah or Simon, email info@scriptorium.com and we’ll set something up.

Madcap Software

MadCap Software Adds Powerful New Features, Usability Improvements to the Latest Release of Flare, Blaze, and More

In an effort to provide the very best in technical communication, MadCap Software is pleased to announce the latest release of MadCap Flare, Blaze, Analyzer, X-Edit and Echo.

Web, Print, Desktop — and Now Mobile with MadCap Flare
Ensure your documentation is accessible to users, wherever they are, with Flare’s new mobile output feature. Add in usability improvements and other new features such as File Tagging for project management, and you have the most complete XML-based authoring and publishing solution available today.

New in Flare Version 6:

WebHelp Mobile (iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, BlackBerry and more)
Batch Generate and Publish
File Tagging and Reporting
Link Viewer
Improved Microsoft Team Foundation Server Integration
Regenerating MadCap Capture Images
Template Manager and Template Improvements
Target Editor & Table of Contents Editor Improvements
Import and Convert Multiple HTML Pages
Send Multiple Files for Review
Structure Bar Improvements
Enhanced Multimedia Support
Index and Concept Window Pane Enhancements
New PDF Engine with Improved Font and Character Support
Plus much more!

MadPak Product Suites

MadCapʼs newest releases can be purchased together in one complete product suite. The MadPak product suite—featuring MadCap Flare, X-Edit, Analyzer, Mimic, Capture and Echo—is a collection of tightly integrated authoring tools that give technical writers the power and ﬂexibility to develop rich, robust documentation. For those involved in translation, The MadPak ML product suite includes everything you love about MadPak, and combines it with MadCap Lingo, the industry’s ﬁrst fully-integrated translation memory and authoring solution.

For more information, visit www.madcapsoftware.com.

Blog Sponsors

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.

Blog Sponsors

Upcoming DITA and XML Seminars from Palimpsest

Tom Johnson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:38:40 +0000

Sarah O’Keefe at Palimpsest is offering several webinars on DITA and XML. I attended a webinar by Sarah before. It was clear, straightforward, and engaging. I definitely recommend her.

Blog Sponsors

The State of Structured Authoring in Technical Communication (podcast)

Tom Johnson — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:16:53 +0000

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 11 min.

In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium Publishing explains the results of their recent survey about the state of structured authoring in technical communication. In the survey, they found that 84% of respondents are either thinking of moving to structured authoring, are in the process of moving to structured authoring, have already adopted structured authoring, or are undecided. Only 16% of respondents said they were not moving to structured authoring. She also discusses other survey results, such as the adoption of DITA and mistakes people make in moving to structured authoring.

Blog Sponsors

Structured Authoring Survey from Scriptorium

Tom Johnson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:30:21 +0000

Scriptorium

Scriptorium has created a brief survey about structured authoring. The purpose of the survey is to gather “input from everyone: those who have implemented structured authoring, are planning to implement it, or have decided against it.”

The survey only took me about three minutes to complete. When the results are published, each participant receives a free copy (valued at $200).

Take the survey here.

You can read more details about the survey here.

Blog Sponsors

Web 2.0: The Tipping Point for XML (application/pdf)

Tom Johnson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:14:04 +0000

Web 2.0: The Tipping Point for XML (application/pdf)