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In late February, Sarah O'Keefe spoke at the WinWriters conference
in Seattle. Here's what Sarah had to say about the conference:
HTML Help Update from Microsoft
This was an official Microsoft presentation.
Microsoft announced the HTML Help version 1.2 features. A point
of emphasis was that the installation of Internet Explorer 5 can
be configured to be completely silent, which means that end users
are not made aware that IE5 components are being installed on their
machine.
HTML Help was touted as a stable platform, and developers were
encouraged to focus on it because RTF-based WinHelp is not longer
being supported.
The unanswered question at this presentation was, "What about the
lawsuit?" Given the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the Microsoft
antitrust trial, it seems unwise to me to rely on Microsoft's built-in
browser for online help delivery.
Single-sourcing tools
I attended a presentation by JoAnn Hackos on single-sourcing and
documentation databases. She mentioned several interesting tools
for document management. If you have a large amount of content,
you may want to take a look at Canterbury, which is made by Chrystal
Software (http://www.chrystal.com).
The Canterbury product lets you maintain your FrameMaker content
under source control, but instead of working at the file level,
it lets you define much smaller chunks or content (like paragraphs).
Instead of calling it a document management system, Chrystal refers
to its product as a content management system.
New help formats
Sun announced that JavaHelp (http://www.javasoft.com/products/javahelp/)
is now in "release candidate" status; more than beta, but not quite
ready for general release. JavaHelp is an interesting option for
Java-based applications and can, with some additional coding, be
used for non-Java applications. The Sun folks gave an interesting
product overview. Their case was strengthened by a excellent presentation
from Craig Sherod of Marimba, who described how that company deployed
JavaHelp to deliver online help for their Castanet product.
Another interesting alternative is OracleHelp, which builds on
JavaHelp and adds some additional features.
Most help vendors showed new cross-browser, cross-platform help
systems. In most cases, these systems looked very similar. They
used Java or JavaScript to deliver help in the popular "tri-pane"
look, with a frame on the left with tabs for the table of contents,
index, and search, and a frame on the right with the content. Blue
Sky (RoboHelp) and ForeFront (ForeHelp) had systems with these features.
Quadralay Corporation also showed a cross-browser, cross-platform
help system, in the form of a new template for WebWorks Publisher.
Their help format is WebWorks Help, and will be included in the
upcoming 4.5 release of the product (http://www.quadralay.com).
They're also adding support for structured FrameMaker documents,
an easier way to modify cross-references, an easier way to use files
created externally, better graphics output, and a few other goodies.
(If you're interested in our training, you'll be happy to know that
we're hard at work adding these new features to our training materials.)
New products
One interesting product shown at the conference is LiveLinx. It's
basically a tool for postprocessing HTML output. It's an unusual
approach. Take a look at http://www.livelinx.com
if you want to know more.
FrameMaker: more exposure than expected
I arrived at WinWriters expecting a very Word-focused conference.
But to my surprise, many of the presentations and most of the attendees
included references to FrameMaker-based development. It seems that
most of those attendees who are creating complex printed documentation
are using FrameMaker for it. Companies who are offering ways to
reuse FrameMaker content in online help were very popular.
Acrobat 4
Adobe announced Acrobat 4 at the conference. The major new features
are focused on "PDF workflow"; they include digital signatures and
improved annotation capabilities. Acrobat Distiller for Windows
(only) will include digital signatures. Acrobat Distiller for UNIX
is being discontinued. Acrobat Distiller for Macintosh will be released
concurrently with the Windows version, but it will not initially
include all the same features. Adobe expects to deliver a Mac maintenance
release to bring it up to the same level as the Windows version.
Once Acrobat 4 is officially released, only Acrobat 4 Reader products
will be available from Adobe's web site. There is some question
whether the "basic" Reader version 4 will include search capability.
Apparently, some bean counter at Adobe thinks they can make money
off the search feature, and they may not license the Reader v.4
with Search for free. This went over with the WinWriters audience
like a ton of bricks. Stay tuned on that one.
I asked Les Hirsch, the Adobe rep (lhirsch@adobe.com)
whether Adobe was planning a Java version. With a coy smile, he
said, "Put yourself in John Warnock's [Adobe's CEO] shoes.
You deliver a product across 17 different platforms and a technology
comes along that makes it possible to deliver a single product instead."
Overall, a very interesting conference. I delivered a presentation
on how to structure FrameMaker files for output to multiple media.
If you'd like to read the presentation, with notes, see "Using FrameMaker
as a Help Authoring Tool" (PDF,
42K). A more technical white paper is also available."Delivering
dual-use content" (PDF,
197K) describes how to set up FrameMaker files to create help features.
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