I'd Rather Be Writing » Word

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

MadCap Blaze: a new publishing powerhouse? | A Technical Communication Community

Tom Johnson — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:17:57 +0000

MadCap Blaze: a new publishing powerhouse? | A Technical Communication Community.

Blog Sponsors

Watch What Happens When You Copy from Word into a Blog Post

Tom Johnson — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:45:56 +0000

Watch what happens when you copy and paste two sentences from Word into a new blog post.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://idratherbewriting.com/jing/wordcodebloat.swf" height="600" width="500" /]

Word Macro for Resizing Images that Have a Specific Style

Tom Johnson — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:58:27 +0000

When you single source from an online help authoring tool and generate an output to Microsoft Word, almost invariably you have some clean-up reformatting to do. For me, one of these areas deals with screenshot images.

I prefer to have Word resize my screenshots (to a smaller size) because images look a lot sharper and crisper when Word resizes them rather than when SnagIt or Photoshop resizes them (even with smooth scaling selected).

Whatever your cleanup process, you might find the following image resizing macro helpful. It only resizes images that have a specific style (p_Result) before the image. It resizes the image to 75% of its original size.

Note: It’s important to isolate images that are surrounded by a specific style because you don’t want to resize all your images. You don’t want your note, tip, caution, and button images shrunk to 75% of their original size. Also, your substep images may need to have smaller sizes than your regular image sizes.

Here’s the macro:

Sub ImageResize()
Dim PercentSize As Integer
Dim MyStyle As String
Dim oIshp As InlineShape
Dim oshp As Shape
PercentSize = InputBox(“Enter percent of full size”, “ResizePicture “, 75)
MyStyle = “p_Result”
With ActiveDocument
For Each oIshp In .InlineShapes
With oIshp
If .Range.Paragraphs(1).Style = MyStyle Then
.ScaleHeight = PercentSize
.ScaleWidth = PercentSize
End If
End With
Next oIshp
For Each oshp In .Shapes
With oshp
If .Anchor.Paragraphs(1).Style = MyStyle Then
.ScaleHeight Factor:=(PercentSize / 100), _
RelativeToOriginalSize:=msoCTrue
.ScaleWidth Factor:=(PercentSize / 100), _
RelativeToOriginalSize:=msoCTrue
End If
End With
Next oshp
End With
End Sub

If you have no idea how to integrate a macro into your Word document, follow these steps. (This applies to Word 2007.)

Click the Developer tab, and then click the Macros button.
Type a name for the macro, such as ImageResize, and then click Create.
Highlight the code that starts with Sub ImageResize and ends with End Sub.
Paste the sample code above in its place, and then click Save and close the macro window.

To run the macro, first make sure your images have a p_Result style before them. Then do the following:

Click the Developer tab, and then click the Macros button.
Select the ImageResize macro, and click the Run button.

MadCap Software Sponsors the Tech Writer Voices Podcast

Tom Johnson — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:53:08 +0000

I’m proud to welcome another sponsor to the Tech Writer Voices podcast: MadCap Flare.

You may be wondering exactly what sponsorship involves. Basically, it’s different for each company, but I’m offering promotion on my podcasts in exchange for a free copy of the company’s product. This is actually something that Heidi Hansen, my co-host, encouraged me to do long ago.

So for the past week, I’ve been exploring MadCap Flare Version 3.1 with a lot more depth than I explored the trial version of the 2.0 release last year. I’m thoroughly impressed with Flare. It provides a robust, functional online help tool that simply works. When I say robust, I mean it. The granularity of the style editor is powerful — allowing you to create stylesheets for both online and print formats.

Some other things that stand out:

The generated output to print actually conforms to the styles you configure in the style editor.
The conditional tagging is intuitive and easy to apply.
The net DotNet format allows you to deliver context-sensitive help that is embedded and dynamic.
The Webhelp skin is easy to customize.
Flare’s built-in help is excellent — no need for a third-party book to guide you through the product.

Although some aspects aren’t as obvious as I hoped, Flare is a tool that I won’t easily grow out of. And their expansion into other areas — screen capture, audio, translation, screen demo, and more — makes their product suite compelling. In some ways Flare is similar to RoboHelp, and in many other ways it’s completely unique.

I know I sound like a marketing brochure, so I will admit one thing I don’t understand about Flare. A new feature of Flare is Easy-Sync, explained as follows:

A first in the industry. Flare supports two different work flows when importing Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker documents. With the standard import you can leverage existing content and then continue your editing and maintenance using Flares built in editor. However, with the new Easy Sync capability you can have Flare treat the original Word or FrameMaker document as the source file. This allows you to do all of your edits and maintenance in the original Word or FrameMaker document and still get all of the powerful publishing capabilities of Flare. The first tool in the industry to support two different work flows within the same product.

What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to maintain a source file in Microsoft Word and then publish to an online help format. Flare’s online help editor is so much easier to format and manipulate content than Word. Working in Microsoft Word and publishing to online help seems backwards.

The only logic I see is that some authors may prefer Word due to their familiarity with it.

MadCap’s pace is impressive, and the sophistication and functionality of Flare is astounding considering that the product is less than 2 years old.

Look to some upcoming podcasts dedicated specifically to Flare and other Madcap products.

By the way, are you a Flare user? I’d be interested to hear your experiences with it or any other Madcap product.