At Adobe, we always strive to empower you with best-in-class tools for your technical communication needs.

But the process leading to the development of your favorite Adobe Tech Comm tools and the marketing communication for these tools has always been a two-way street.

We value your thoughts and ideas, and welcome your feedback and opinions on product features as well as the communication you see and hear from us.

Have your “SAY” because your opinion matters to us!

5 minutes of your time is all that we ask for, and a few clicks to answer 25 easy multiple choice questions.

Ooops! We almost forgot the fun part!

All survey participants completing the questionnaire will be entered into a sweepstakes, and 7 lucky winners will win grand prizes!

We will be announcing the winners on the Adobe Tech Comm blog, as well as other social media networking sites, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook!

The survey closes at 11.59 PM PST on 5^th June 2013 and the winners will be announced on or before 8^th of June 2013.

So what are you waiting for? Share your views in just 5 minutes and qualify to win grand prizes! Thank you in advance for your participation in this survey.

Adobe has published a downloadable PDF case study which details highlights of this new venture. Ann Rockley, CEO and founder of the Rockley Group states today’s publishing challenge very succinctly: “Publishing only to print no longer suits an increasingly mobile audience that needs on-the-go access to compelling, interactive information.” She adds that all publishers—not just technical communicators—need new ways to easily create content in a single source environment, manage the storage and retrieval of content, and design structured layouts to automatically flow XML-based content into multiple print, eBook, Web, and mobile formats.

The Rockley Group’s goal for publication of DITA Metrics 101 was to find a better way to automatically create indices, tables of contents, links, as well as add and update cross-references and integrate other features that would enhance the reading and tablet/mobile navigation experience.

Streamlined, single-source DITA workflow

The basic publishing workflow was to import content from a variety of Microsoft Word documents into Adobe FrameMaker and convert and create original XML content in FrameMaker at the same time; this helped guarantee that all content was modular and without prior formatting. Once content was brought into FrameMaker, the Rockley group used Tech Comm Suite’s integration with RoboHelp to make the eBook come to life, using CSS and FrameMaker templates down to the character level.

The team was surprised at how easily they could generate print versions and multiple eBook or HTML5 versions of the book with minimal customization. “The entire process was far easier than I imagined. With just a few changes, RoboHelp largely produced the eBook on its own,” says Esther Cressall, desktop publisher at The Rockley Group. “One of the best things about Adobe Technical Communication Suite is that the RoboHelp user interface looks similar to the FrameMaker interface, making it easy to navigate between the two applications.” When Cressall needed guidance, she found the online help and video documentation extremely useful.

Major improvements in RoboHelp over several releases

Cressall was a bit apprehensive about using RoboHelp, since her previous experience was with a much older version from a decade ago. “I was not sure about using RoboHelp for this particular use at the outset, but it ended being a great experience,” she says.

The Rockley group plans to continue to use Tech Comm Suite to publish future books to print and multiple tables and mobile devices, as they have saved a considerable amount of time and money not depending on third parties to produce this work.

Try it for yourself!

Don’t take our word for it (or the many experts referenced in the compendium of reviews listed above.) You can have your own hands on with Tech Comm Suite 4 by clicking here. Once you do, we think you’ll find that the wait is over and time to act is now. And by the way, if you like to “pay as you go,” Tech Comm Suite 4 is now available on a monthly subscription basis.

Levels of Re-use, by Tony Self

At the heart of most advanced authoring and publishing systems is the concept of re-use. As the name implies, re-use means using the same piece of information in different places. Looking deeper, we can find that there are different levels of re-use, ranging from the superficial to the systematic.

Superficially, when you copy a paragraph out of an e-mail, and paste it into another e-mail, or a report, you are re-using that paragraph. However, that’s not what is normally meant by re-use in technical communication. Re-use is more properly considered to be re-using the original piece of content somewhere else without copying it. The original piece is used again through a method called transclusion, which is derived from trans (Latin, meaning across) and inclusion. Including a piece of information from one place across to another location, topic, document, or publication.

Transclusion is part of an ideal called WOOO – Write Once and Once Only. The theory of WOOO is there is an enormous amount of efficiency in writing something once, and maintaining it from that single location. If a suite of 100 camera manuals all carry a description of SD cards, then it saves time and money to write this piece of information once, and simply transclude it to the other places where it is needed.

Variables and snippets – features found in many authoring tools – serve this purpose. Another type of re-use is often overlooked. If you have a Help topic that is used in more than one place in a document, that topic can be referenced more than once in the Table of Contents (TOC). In other words, the same topic can be re-used in a second place simply by creating a second pointer to that topic. While there are many arguments against repeating the same topic in the one publication, it is much clearer in a single-sourcing environment, where many outputs are produced from the one source project, where there might be different TOCs for each output. So having a number of TOCs with common topic references is another type of re-use. So re-use is at the heart of single-sourcing, and single-sourcing reduces the cost of documentation.

The degree to which re-use can be implemented is determined by the smallest taggable element. For example, a word cannot be re-used unless it is wrapped in its own tag. Working backwards from that point, we can find four distinct types of re-use. We can represent these levels as a pyramid.

Four Levels of Content Re-use

At the simplist level, re-use of TOCs, or topic maps (ditamaps in DITA authoring), may involves referencing one map in multiple maps. This allows a section of a document to be repeated across multiple documents. This is document level content re-use, where the unit of re-use is the topic map.

Perhaps the most common form of re-use is when one topic is referenced by more than one topic map, and therefore the same topic is re-used in different content collections. This is topic level re-use, where the unit of re-use is a topic.

A block element within a topic, such as a paragraph or note, can be re-used in another topic through transclusion. (In DITA, this is called a conref, or content reference). This type of re-use is paragraph level re-use, where the unit of re-use is a block element.

The finest re-use granularity is phrase level content re-use. This involves using transclusions to re-use words or phrases (or inline elements) from one topic in other topics, where the unit of re-use is an inline element. Examples of this sort of re-use includes product names, trademarks, and user interface labels.

Re-used phrases can be used within re-used paragraphs. Likewise, re-used paragraphs can be used within re-used topics, and re-used topics can be used within re-used ditamaps.

Being able to work comfortably with re-use is important for a technical communicator, but more critical is to develop strategies for managing re-use. Knowing that some content has already been written, particularly when working in a team, is the biggest or many challenges. But exciting challenges they are!

————————————————–

Below are links to his latest recorded webinar sessions with Tony Self:

• HYPERWRITE Sess 2) The importance of metadata

• HYPERWRITE Sess 1) Topic-based Information Development

Below are links to register for the remaining upcoming webinars in this HYPERWRITE series:

• HYPERWRITE Sess 3) Separation of Content and Form

• HYPERWRITE Sess 4) 10 Acronyms Changing the World of Technical Communication

• HYPERWRITE Sess 5) Thoughts on the future of Help systems

————————————————–

About Tony Self: Based in Melbourne, Australia, Dr Tony Self (@hyperwrite) has over 30 years of experience as a technical communicator. For over 20 years, Tony has worked in the areas of online help systems, computer-based training, and XML documents. In 1993, he founded HyperWrite, a company providing training and consultancy in structured authoring, Help systems, DITA, and technology strategy. Tony completed his PhD in semantic mark-up languages in 2011, and his book The DITA Style Guide was published in the same year. He is a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (and chair of the DITA Help Subcommittee), is an adjunct teaching fellow at Swinburne University, and is the Director of Training for TCTrainNet, a training initiative of tekom, the German professional association for technical communicators.

Artwork is part of the paragraph format

FrameMaker allows you to assign artwork from the Reference Page to appear above and/or below a paragraph. This is often used for something as simple as double lines or a row of leaves to make a paragraph “look fancy.” However, you can easily create a shadow box with the word “Caution” or “Warning” in it, and then assign that named arwork to appear above a designated paragraph.

Seeing is believing: watch the video!

Tables automatically populated with graphics!

FrameMaker 11 not only has table styles, but the unique ability to “remember” what paragraph style was in the first row of each column when the style was updated. This means that you can place a paragraph style that displays Reference Page artwork in a cell of the first row, update the table style and have that Reference Page artwork appear each time you create a new instance of the table.

The benefits are that (a) all authors using the templates will create an identical side-aligned caution or warning statement and (b) you can modify the artwork on the Reference Page one time and have all instances in all caution tables update simultaneously.

Seeing is believing: watch the video!

Is FrameMaker right for you? Take the Quiz!

You can use a calculator to determine how much time and money FrameMaker can save your over Word. Or, you can take a Quiz to determine if your workload is a good fit for FrameMaker. Simply go to http://www.douwriteright.com/

Have your own hands-on with FrameMaker 11 and decide how you can use it

Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4 includes FrameMaker 11, which is an excellent authoring solution and also a versatile structured editor for DITA/XML. The possibilities with these new tools are as limitless as the profiles of our existing and potential customers. To discover how you can use FrameMaker, download a trial copy of FrameMaker 11 today. After having your own hands-on, you may decide in favor of the best bargain of all, obtaining a cloud subscription to the entire Tech Comm Suite 4, which includes RoboHelp 10, Captivate 6 and other products in addition to FrameMaker 11.

The image below identifies the white paper which you will wish to download:

This blog touches on some highlights from both webinar and white paper.

Key topics around the changing nature of content

1. What is the traditional approach to technical writing?
2. The Technical Writer’s relationship with the reader
3. Why change? The weakness with the current approach
4. Towards a new model
5. What are the benefits for doing this?
6. Using Adobe Tools

Traditional approach to technical writing

Pratt covers several historic traditional approaches that still influence content creation, including:

• Information Mapping
• Minimalism
• QRC
• STOP

The traditional model: usually noted as succinct, clear and unambiguous, numbered lists, topic-based writing, unemotional and an active voice. The traditional model is good for content that involves:

• safety
• risk
• a hierarchical, command and control, culture
• anxiety

Technical writer’s relationship with the reader

Traditionally this has been “adult to adult” and “unemotional.”  The Traditional User Assistance (UA) model has been prone to islands of information, including Forums, Help and Training as discrete units.

Why change?

Key issues are the phenomenon of “no-one reads the manual” and uncertainty over UA content’s value. Technology is changing, and some content creators may feel that they are more in control, and have more influence over the reader. Rapidly changing technology is influencing everything, including how we purchase technology. “Try before you buy” has become much more common.

In this new landscape, your potential clients must “come up to speed” and find the support they need in order to buy the product and actually become customers. Apps for mobile devices are also influencing a drop in product prices. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of App abandonment (for inexpensive apps.)

Users are changing and becoming more competent

Users want to master products and tasks. People are motivated by Autonomy, Master and Purpose.

 Towards a new model

We still need technical communication in order to:

• explain unfamiliar concepts
• explain how to tinker and hack
• differentiate its product from its competitors
• help keep the product from becoming a commodity

We don’t have the option of using one type of relationship between writer and reader. Some services like LinkedIn have a much more conversational tone in Help pages than what is found with other services.

Tone of voice and context

Context can create a sense of authority or importance, as Ellis points out with some “on the street” examples. There are several examples of tone from various types of Help shared:

• Friendly/Submissive
• Dominant

One useful online resource is a set of examples from MailChimp’s style guide. They have published their style guide on a site called VoiceandTone.com.

 Developing and integrated model for learning, User Assistance and mastery

Help and learning (or training) are becoming much more integrated than in days of previous technologies. This is a significant move away the traditional model shown in the previous screen capture. Ellis shared a basis for understanding the competence of users, summarized in the two slides below:

In both white paper and webinar recording, Ellis makes it crystal clear what the differences are between users who know that they are incompetent from users who are totally unconscious of this fact. Obviously, this can have a huge impact on how you can create successful, engaging content.

A unified system

Trends today are for users to want to go to a single place for necessary or useful information. This requires an integration of knowledge that was previously encapsulated in different forms and locations. The slide below gives you a hint of how Ellis describes this process.

What do we measure to ensure success?

• correlate results with increased or decreased support calls
• ratings of usefulness
• user comments
• usability testing
• task completion

Matching Adobe Tech Comm products with this new design for User Assistance

In the recording, Ellis gives several useful examples of how and when either FrameMaker or RoboHelp could be used at various levels on a new UA design. The slide below summarizes his points, including Captivate, Presenter and Illustrator as other key tools found in Adobe Tech Comm Suite.

Solutions include creation of widgets, and role-based content views generated from conditional text and user variables. You will find examples at about the 30-35 minute point in the webinar. Although the focus of both white paper and webinar are key concepts rather than product demo, you may find a tour of Adobe Tech Comm Suite useful.

Have your own hands-on with Adobe Tech Comm Suite 4 and decide how you can use it

Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4 includes FrameMaker 11, which is an excellent authoring solution and also a versatile structured editor for DITA/XML. In addition, RoboHelp 10 makes it extremely simple to publish multiple versions of your content to multiscreen HTML5. The possibilities with these new tools are as limitless as the profiles of our existing and potential customers. To discover how you can use Tech Comm Suite, download a trial copy  today. After having your own hands-on, you may decide in favor of the best bargain of all, obtaining a cloud subscription to the entire Tech Comm Suite 4, which includes RoboHelp 10, Captivate 6 and other products in addition to FrameMaker 11.

In my last post on this thread, I described how you can create multiscreen HTML5 content for various devices using RoboHelp 10. Since my last post, I have had several conversations with users regarding this functionality. I presented the multiscreen HTML5 feature in the TC World Bangalore conference, where a number of users attended the session and asked several questions. A few weeks later, Peter Grainge, who is one of the leading RoboHelp expert, presented the best practices for creating content for multi-screen devices at WritersUA Conference. He also created a sample multiscreen HTML5 project by modifying the Salesbuilder project. You can download Peter’s presentation and the sample project from here. You can also see a working demo of the Salesbuilder project here.

In the last couple of months, we also witnessed that the number of users, who used the multi-screen functionality, increased substantially. Many of them reached out to Adobe and reported a few issues which we have fixed in our RoboHelp 10.0.1 patch. You can see all the issues that we have fixed here.

This is the last post in the multiscreen HTML5 series. In this post, I will show you how you can create native android app for your help projects.

Step 1

In RoboHelp, click on File -> Generate -> Native Mobile App. You will be presented with a dialogue box where you need to specify the output path, where you want to save the app, and the Multiscreen HTML5 SSL, which will define the layouts for the app. One good feature of RoboHelp is that you can create a single Android App which will appear differently on phones and tablets, provided you have specified different layouts for phones and tablets in your Multiscreen HTML5 SSL settings.

Under the “Android App Settings”, you will see the “Metadata” tab where you can specify the metadata such as application name, package name, and application version for your app.

Step 2

In the “Application Icons” tab,  specify the images which you want to display as app icons for low density, medium density, and high density mobile/tablet devices. The icons can be of any image type.

Step 3

The final step is to provide all the necessary SDK/JDK. If you have these setups installed on your machine, you just need to specify the correct path, else you can download them by clicking on the “download” button. Once you specify all the paths, click on generate to create a native Android app for your help project.

Distributing the app

Once you have generated the native android app you can make it available for users by either submitting to Google Play Store or by simply distributing the APK file to users via e-mail or uploading to a web-server. The users can download the file and copy it to their Android device. Once copied, opening the file from the device’s file manager will install the application on the device.

I hope you find this information useful and use this workflow to create Android apps. Please send me a mail to provide your feedback.

Other posts in this series

HTML5 Publishing Series Post #1: Why you should publish your content in HTML5

HTML5 Publishing Series Post #2: Creating multiscreen HTML5 output using RoboHelp 10

Vikram Verma

Product Manager – RoboHelp & TCS

Follow me on Twitter @vikverma2013

LinkedIn Profile

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 announced the Adobe Day well in advance and all related information is already available on the event microste as well as the STC’s Lanyrd page.

We have a great set of speakers this time too and the event will be flagged off with a session from the Father of FrameMaker, Chas Corefield! Yes, it’s a BYOT (Bring Your Own Thoughts) party. There will be ample opportunities to get your thoughts heard, your questions answered, and of course to network with some of the best minds in the industry!

So if you are at Atlanta (don’t have to be an STC Summit attendee) or arriving a day early for the Summit, do register here and drop by. This is a free event and seats are assigned on a first-register-first-serve basis. See you soon! Keep tracking updates on twitter by following @AdobeTCS / the #AdobeDay hashtag.

]]> http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2013/04/adobeday.html/feed 0 http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2013/04/ie-10-fix-released-for-robohelp.html http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2013/04/ie-10-fix-released-for-robohelp.html#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:58:03 +0000 Vikram Verma http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/?p=6522 read more...]]> Dear All,

I am pleased to announce that we have fixed a recently reported issue related to IE 10. The issue description and the solution is described below.

Issue

If the end-users access the published help on IE 10 browser, once they navigate back from Index/Search/Glossary to Contents, they were not able to see the content in the right pane. Everything used to work well if the user refreshed the browser or adjusted the width of the TOC pane.

Solution

We have provided a solution for the problem which the RoboHelp 10 users can install on their machine. In addition to the fix on RoboHelp 10, we have also provided fixes which users can apply on the published outputs created using either RoboHelp 10 or RoboHelp 9.

The detailed knowledge base article containing instructions for applying the solution can be found here.

I encourage everyone to apply this fix. If you have further question, please write to me.

Update: Please note that when accessing the published output on IE 10, the JavaScript should be enabled for the fix to work fine. For majority of the users it is enabled by default but for some users, the JavaScript might be disabled.

Vikram Verma

Product Manager – RoboHelp & TCS

Follow me on Twitter @vikverma2013

LinkedIn Profile

In our #writeright outreach campaign, we recently created 3 new videos that highlight just a few of the tables capabilities within FrameMaker.

FrameMaker Table Styles

FrameMaker is unique compared to Word and other authoring tools in that it maintains a separate catalog of table styles. These styles remember space above/below a table, it’s placement, how table titles are handled, and which horizontal/vertical rules display as well as tinted rows or columns. Table styles are named and can easily be applied to an existing tables.

Once table styles have been applied throughout a document, you may easily make global updates to the appearance and values of “named” tables based on their table styles. Watch the video below to find out how!

FrameMaker’s options for resizing table columns

Resizing a table column may seem like a basic function, but FrameMaker gives you a wide array of options. Not only can you manually drag table column borders, you may use a special resize column width menu to make table columns: match another column, have a precise width, or even make several selected columns resize themselves proportionally to fit within a specific width.

View the brief video below to see an overview of these powerful options.

Indicators for multi-page tables

FrameMaker has long excelled at creating long, multi-page tables with complex or rich content. When tables have to break across many pages, it is highly useful to have repeating table header or footer rows with categories to indicate the purpose of various columns. Most authoring tools, including Word have this ability. But FrameMaker also has a simple, built-in indicator tool (system variable) that will (a) indicate that a table is continued from a previous page and (b) indicate which sheet from the total number of pages or sheets the current view comprises.

Once again, watch a very brief video to see just how easy it is to use this feature.

Have your own hands-on with FrameMaker 11 and decide how you can use it

Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4 includes FrameMaker 11, which is an excellent authoring solution and also a versatile structured editor for DITA/XML. The possibilities with these new tools are as limitless as the profiles of our existing and potential customers. To discover how you can use FrameMaker, download a trial copy of FrameMaker 11 today. After having your own hands-on, you may decide in favor of the best bargain of all, obtaining a cloud subscription to the entire Tech Comm Suite 4, which includes RoboHelp 10, Captivate 6 and other products in addition to FrameMaker 11.

I will be attending the STC Summit at Atlanta during 5th to 8th May. I would like to meet as many of you as possible, and discuss how we can improve the product going forward. During the conference, you can catch me at the Adobe Booth. On 6th May, I’ll also be giving a session presentation titled “Creating Adaptive Content for Multi-Screen Devices“.

I will be travelling on the east coast during 29th April to 3rd May, and if any of you would like to meet me to discuss RoboHelp, please drop me an email at vikverma at adobe dot com.

Vikram Verma