Consider this scenario: you're working in a FrameMaker document that uses a lot of conditional tags, including the conditional tag defined for comments and editorial notes. If you need to work on incorporating comments, you can display all the conditional content in the document with the condition indicators visible. However, browsing your way through the multi-colored text to look for comments may be difficult.
DITA Specialization lets you define new information classifications that can be structural or a new domain specification. Structural specialization in DITA lets you define new topic or map structures derived from base topics and maps, such as concept, task, or reference whereas domain specialization in DITA lets you define markup for a specific information domain or subject area, such as programming or hardware.
Click here for step by step instructions on how to create specialized DITA DTDs, derive EDDs for use in FrameMaker, create a complete structured application, and use the specialized DITA DTDs to author content in FrameMaker.
SDL AuthorAssistant is a quality assurance tool for documentation. AuthorAssistant checks documents for corporate writing styles and standards as well as standard spelling and grammar. You can automate most of your style guide rule checks and linguistic checks using AuthorAssistant.
Continue reading "Automating style checks using SDL AuthorAssistant" »
As a technical communicator, you've probably sent more PDFs out for review than any other type of file. Reviewers add their comments, which you incorporate by comparing the PDF file with the source .fm document. So far, but not anymore! FrameMaker 9 lets you import PDF comments directly into your documents.
It's a simple three-step workflow that you can now follow for reviews:
1. Generate a tagged PDF out of the FM file and send it for shared review. To do this, check Generate PDF For Review Only in the PDF Setup dialog box.
See Tagged PDF in the online FM documentation for details on tagged PDFs.
2. Let reviewers add their suggestions using the commenting features in Adobe Acrobat -- sticky notes, text edits, text highlights, and so on.
3. Import the comments back into the source .fm file and choose which ones to keep. Before importing comments, FrameMaker lets you select if you want to import all comments or only comments of a specific kind.
Here’s announcing the release of the much awaited Adobe Technical Communication Suite (TCS) 2.0. Its unique combination of products provide a complete end-to-end solution to authoring, reviewing, managing, and publishing content across multiple channels for multiple purposes and outputs. All the primary authroing products of TCS 2.0 namely FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and Captivate have been majorly enhanced with a number of exciting features to simplify and enrich the authoring and publishing process. Also, TCS 2.0 suite has a new addition, Adobe Photoshop CS4, a product that’s been an industry standard for digital imaging.
Going forwards we hope to bring you more than just a primer on all the new features and what’s really exciting about them.
In the meantime for information on the TCS 2.0 suite check out http://www.adobe.com/products/technicalcommunicationsuite/.
You can also check out the individual point products that make up TCS 2.0.
Adobe FrameMaker 9
http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FrameMaker/9.0/Using/
Adobe RoboHelp 8
http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/RoboHelp/8.0/RoboHTML/
Adobe Captivate 4
http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Captivate/4.0/Using/
Adobe Photoshop CS4
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/
Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatproextended/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/9.0/3D/index.html
Adobe Presenter 7
http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Presenter/7.0/index.html
Watch this space for more!