Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf in the UK made a very compelling presentation on the Changing Nature of Content in a recent webinar with Adobe. There is a webinar recording, and a detailed white paper (authored by Pratt) which you can download on this subject. NOTE: both of the links in the previous sentence will take read more…
Hello everyone! At the last STC Summit last year in Chicago, we had several people come up to us and say they were sad they missed the amazing lineup of speakers we had at Adobe Day just one day prior to the Summit opening. To ensure no one misses the great opportunity this time, we’ve read more…
In conversion projects, time is often the limiting factor. Even if you really feel the entire 500-page manual should be converted to DITA or some other structure, you might be stuck with the old materials for a long time to come. And while you are hacking away at the old document, changing details in the read more…
There is a a considerable contrast between Microsoft Word and FrameMaker regarding the way that styles, catalogs and removal of format overrides are handles. Word displays character styles (e.g. emphasized words) and paragraph styles (e.g. lists of headings) together in one style catalog. FrameMaker has a separate catalog for: paragraph styles character styles table styles read more…
Many jobs are tedious, involving a repetitive sequence of commands that must be executed on a large number of almost identical elements in a document. And because they are tedious and feel like a waste of time on the part of the author, attention may decrease and errors may go unnoticed. This, apart from the increase in read more…
Speaking from my over one thousand hours of experience “optimizing” unstructured FrameMaker files for translation and localization, I can vouch for the following fact: FrameMaker 11’s ability to handle catalog styles more efficiently than FrameMaker 7.x and its ability search and locate format overrides can reduce some production preparation tasks by as much as 90%! read more…
“We left Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint off the survey because they are so ubiquitous in the IT industry. In past surveys over 90% of respondents indicated using Word.“ - 2012 WritersUA User Assistance Tools Survey Word is one of the most pervasive and widely used documentation tool in the world. It however does not meet read more…
In the first part of this 2-part article, I explained how mixing structured with unstructured content in the same publication process was vital to the success of several conversion projects I have undertaken in the past years. It is simply not feasible for a company to stop for months while rewriting their legacy documentation or converting all read more…
Versions of FrameMaker after FrameMaker 7.2 introduced two potent features that could be reason alone to upgrade to FrameMaker 11: (a) track changes and (b) ability to import PDF review comments and annotations “in place” in the source FrameMaker document. Both of the features streamline the edit and review process substantially. Sample documents used for read more…
Our third “video blog” on FrameMaker 11 for Word users focuses on the dynamics of page layout. This is possibly one of the areas in “basic” FrameMaker where feature advantages over Word are most pronounced. Since Word was originally developed as a personal, productivity word processor on a platform (PC with DOS) that did not read more…
