Sideheads are most frequently seen in a traditional resume. Sideheads, with headings placed in the outer page margins, are relatively easy to accomplish with Microsoft Word, if the heading is only one line long and has no long breaks. Multi-line sideheads in Word are quite another story. This is one feature that stands in stark 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…
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…
Cross References provide one of the most dramatic contrasts between Word and FrameMaker 11. It is possible to create an xref to a page number, Figure, Table or paragraph in Word. But it requires a string of cross references to achieve what appears to be a complex sentence with reference to a Table, the title, 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…
