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…
FrameMaker 11’s structured editing features and XML support have come a long way from the model introduced ten years ago with FrameMaker 7.0. That earlier release of FrameMaker combined two earlier separate products (Regular FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML), granting customers a “two-for-one” authoring solution; every copy of FrameMaker 7.x could produce either traditional unstructured documents, or read more…
Book building capabilities for managing multiple project assets (chapters, document content) were one of the prime drivers for many users moving to FrameMaker 7.x ten years ago. Ironically, the powers associated with this feature have increased exponentially with recent releases. For anyone who has to manage multiple chapters in various stages of approval, enhanced hierarchical read more…
Many of us have heard about publishing from FrameMaker 11 to HTML5 “via RoboHelp 10″ in Tech Comm Suite 4.0. But just how much work does this involve, anyway? Surprisingly, not very much. Although it is relatively easy to either create or modify your own RoboHelp project, Adobe thoughtfully planted a built-in “Default” RoboHelp project read more…
Long time FrameMaker maven and trainer, Barb Binder of Rocky Mountain Training, was our recent webinar guest in a lively session entitled “FrameMaker 11 Classroom in a Book: meet the author, see it on iPad!” In this engaging interview, Barb revealed what led her to write the book in the first place, and the reception 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…
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…
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…
This is the first in a series of several brief blogs that highlight some videos we have created to compliment our #WriteRight compaign. Be sure to visit and register for our new micro site, http://www.douwriteright.com/, for a chance to voice your opinion and also to see a growing collection of “mini-videos.” The first feature comparison read more…
Even if it is crystal clear that structured authoring has many advantages, many companies cannot afford to make the jump into the new paradigm. There is too much legacy documentation that cannot be left behind, and there is never time enough to stop all the presses for months while the old content is being converted read more…
