Technical Communication

Technical,communication,Adobe,Review,Commenting,robohelp,FrameMaker,Captivate,Acrobat 3D

Technical communicators receive content from several contributors, for example, from design, engineering, marketing and support teams. Once the content has been gathered, organized and laid out in the output formats, it needs to be reviewed by the contributors for accuracy and completeness.  Sending source project files and long documents with conditional text and variables for review is probably not the best option.  Here, PDF creation capability in authoring tools and review and commenting functionality in Acrobat becomes really useful.

During our discussion at the Writer's UA conference, many customers appreciated this functionality. PDF retains the visual appearance of the content as well as de-links the review and commenting workflow from the project source files. In a PDF document, a content contributor can highlight text, mark deleted text, insert new text, add sticky notes, reply to comments from other reviewers and send these back to the initiator of the review. You can also attach an audio file as a comment to PDF document.

With Acrobat 8 Professional or Acrobat 3D version 8, you can conduct shared reviews. Anyone with Adobe Reader 8 can participate. When you send a document for shared review, all reviewers can see and reply to each other's comments as they are made. For shared review, the PDF document needs to be on a shared network with read/write access to all reviewers. It takes less than a minute to set up the shared network folder, specify a deadline for the review to complete and send e-mails to participants.

Both FrameMaker and RoboHelp can create PDF.  If you haven't tried this review functionality in Acrobat, please do take a look. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Posted by at 4:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Acrobat 3D version 8 is a major step towards re-defining what we mean by rich content. Acrobat 3D provides an ability to include 3D objects in technical communication (Technical Communication: Rich Content - getting richer).

To quote - "With Acrobat 3D Version 8, design engineering, technical publishing and creative professionals in manufacturing industries such as automotive, aerospace and heavy machinery, as well as the AEC market, can convert virtually any 3D CAD file and other critical project data into a highly compressed PDF document with precise geometry." The most interesting part is that the same PDF file can then be shared with colleagues, suppliers, partners, and customers for more collaboration.  At the same time, PDF provides an ability to do this securely.

The preview can be downloaded at labs.adobe.com/technologies/acrobat3d_version8/.

Comments switched off because of frequent spam. Please add your comments to another post. My apologies for inconvenience.

Posted by at 11:17 PM | Permalink

Technical,communication,Adobe,Quality,Innovation,Robohelp,FrameMaker,Captivate,Acrobat 3D

Often in pursuit of new features, quality takes a hit.  Quality is obviously the most important part of any software application. A feature delivers customer value only when it is stable and can be used consistently.  I believe there are a few aspects of quality we need to pay close attention to in the context of HATs.

1. Value to the customer – A new feature must deliver incremental value to the customer.  For example, at present, RoboHelp can export to FrameMaker today in two steps, (a) export the project to RTF, and (b) import the RTF into FrameMaker.  For a new feature, “export to FrameMaker” to add value, it should be significantly better than this existing option.

2. Availability to all end-users – A feature should depend on only those third party products which are widely available. This is one of the main reasons why RoboHelp exports to Microsoft Word for creating PDF and not FrameMaker.

Update- Adobe RoboHelp 6 uses Acrobat Elements to create Adobe PDF. You can do that directly from RoboHelp. Word is only an intermediate step in PDF generation.

3. Ease of use – If a new feature is hard to use, the value of the feature is limited.

4. Promised vs. available set of features – There is an increasing trend of promising features in the later versions. This makes the comparison of HATs an exercise in futility. Also,a customer can use only what exists today, not what will come 12 months later.

I believe it is time to return to fundamental principle of software delivery- Quality.

Posted by at 1:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Technical,communication,Adobe,Single sourcing,Robohelp

In Adobe RoboHelp 6, we added a number of features for Single Sourcing. Here are a few more examples -

1. Apply Conditional tags on Table rows and columns - With improved support for conditional tags, you can now apply them on table rows and columns. And the usage is very simple, in a table, select a row or a column, right-click and apply a conditional tag.  Here is an example -

2. Hyperlinks in Word and PDF export -Hyperlinks in Word and PDF export are retained as hyperlinks.

3. User defined variables - Now, you can define variables. After you insert them at the right location, you can change the value later, providing greater flexibility and control.

Besides single sourcing, we made several enhancements in Adobe RoboHelp 6. This includes command line compile. corrected - Enabling index terms to link to bookmarks inside a topic and not just a topic, already existed prior to RoboHelp 6 . This gives you better control if a particular topic spans across multiple pages and still retains the ease of use.

We continue to look for more suggestions on how to improve these capabilities in RoboHelp further.

Posted by at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Adobe Product Management for Technical Communication Products, Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe RoboHelp, will be attending Writers UA Conference at Long Beach, CA. Prior to the conference, we will to be in the UK for two days, on 22nd and 23rd March, to meet with customers.

If you are planning to attend the conference and will like to share your comments, ideas and suggestions about RoboHelp and FrameMaker, please leave a comment to this post and we will contact you to set up a time with you.

Posted by at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Very often I come across the question – Why DITA? Here is an interesting analogy to try and answer the same. The purpose is not to define DITA, but to share my perspective on what DITA may imply for the technical authoring community.

In the XML authoring paradigm, the document is split into structure, content and style, which are analogues to Driving Rules (structure), car (content) and road network (style). If the content and the style are as per same structure (DTD/Schema), you can generate the output by combining content with the style-sheet.  However, it would not be possible to generate proper output using content and style sheets based on different structures. Similarly, if the cars and the road networks are designed as per same driving rules everything runs smoothly. However, if they are designed as per different driving rules, there would be chaos. E.g. it is difficult to drive a car designed for the US (right hand drive) in UK, where the road networks are designed as per left hand drive.

In a hypothetical world, where each country has its unique set of driving rules, the design of cars and road networks are unique to each country. It is difficult to drive a car designed for country X in country Y. XML authoring leads to a similar situation. Each organization and team has its own set of driving rules (Structure – DTD/Schema), hence it is difficult to share content or apply the same style sheet to content aggregated from different sources.

Imagine if all countries followed the same driving rules. All cars can be driven in any country, and the road networks could be designed, as per the driving rules, without any knowledge of the actual cars that would drive on it. DITA is similar to these universal driving rules. If everyone follows the DITA specifications, it would be easy to share content and apply the same style sheets to the aggregated content.

There have been other standards (universal driving rules) that have come up in the past. But they were good for specific kind of documents (terrains). DITA is different, as it is based on the premises that the same set of driving rules cannot be applied to all terrains (desert, mountains, city, etc.). Therefore, DITA allows each country to specialize the driving rules for its own unique requirements. In addition, DITA also has recommendations on the content (car) design – i.e. topics. This further makes it easier to reuse, manage and share content.

This is what makes DITA promising and makes it worth a serious consideration.

Posted by at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)