“I can write in anything.” “The tool doesn’t matter.” “I can learn any new tool.”
Most of the time, I agree. But then, there are the exceptions.
One of our customers is using FrameMaker to produce content that is delivered in HTML. (They use structured FrameMaker, generate XML, and then transform via XSLT into HTML.) Their rationale for using FrameMaker was:
The project was on an extreme deadline.
The writers already knew FrameMaker.
FrameMaker is already installed on the writers’ systems.
All valid points.
But.
We have had a continuous stream of requests from the writers to make adjustments to the FrameMaker formatting. Things like “the bullets seem a little too far from the text; can you move them over?”
FrameMaker is being used as an authoring tool only. FrameMaker formatting is discarded on export; HTML formatting is controlled mainly by CSS. However, even after repeated explanations, we continue to receive requests to modify the FrameMaker formatting.
In this specific case, the authoring tool does matter. Writers are focusing on the wrong set of issues (leading, kerning, print formatting), none of which is actually relevant for the output.
Why are they focused on this stuff? Because they can. It seems to me that moving authors to a WYSIOO (what you see is one option) tool, such as oXygen or XMetaL, instead of a WYSIWYG tool (FrameMaker) would eliminate the obsession with irrelevant formatting.
Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf is delivering Beyond Documentation this Thursday, July 9th, at 11 a.m. Eastern (US) time. Ellis gave a similar presentation in Vienna, which was the basis for Tom Johnson’s post, How to Avoid Extinction as a Technical Communicator, and led to a lively discussion in the comments. Join us to see if you agree with Ellis’s point of view.
In the category of “what’s old is new again,” we have Writing to STOP from Tony Self of HyperWrite in Australia.
STOP – Sequential Thematic Organisation of Publications – was developed at Hughes Corporation in the 1960s. The purpose of STOP was to improve the speed of document production, and to allow multiple authors to work simultaneously on the same document. […]
The STOP approach still resonates in the age of online documentation, as we still have the same needs to reduce document creation times and to work collaboratively. In this session, we will look at how the STOP approach worked, and how it might be re-applied even more effectively in the 21st century.
That presentation is July 15 at 5 p.m. Eastern time. (Note the time change. Our usual 11 a.m. time slot is 1 a.m. in Melbourne, Australia. That seemed impolite to our presenter.)
If you’ve ever submitted a purchase request that was not approved, chances are it lacked one or more of the vital components management looks for when allocating resources.
In this segment, Jack Molisani will present a fun and practical session identifying the components of a successful business case, how to identify what is important to management, how to maximize your chances of approval, and more.
Jack usually rewards questions with chocolate, and I’m going to be impressed if he manages that in a webinar.
Don’t miss your chance to hear from these guys. You can register through our store; recordings of previous webcasts are now available as well.
PS Our presenters are based in England, California, and Australia. Registrants could be anywhere. The sessions are yours for $20. I love the Internet.
First, read this article in the New York Times about the struggle to keep a reporter’s kidnapping quiet:
For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.
Now, think about these issues as applied to technical communication. Let’s assume that your organization has online community — forums and a wiki, maybe. Technical communicators are responsible for monitoring and managing the community. Under what circumstances do you delete information? How do you respond when:
Information is inaccurate
Information is unflattering
Both
What if the information is accurate but incomplete?
What if someone describes a way of using your product that could cause injury, even though it’s technically possible? Do you delete the information? Do you add a comment warning of possible injury? What if the reader sees the original post but not the comment?
In the absence of safety concerns, I think that accuracy must win. Thus, as the information curator, you have a responsibility to correct inaccurate information. If the inaccuracy is truly dangerous, you may need to edit the post directly. Make sure that you disclosure what you’ve done with brackets. For example:
I like riding my scooter down mountains, especially without guardrails. Wheee! [This is a really bad idea because You Might Die. -moderator]
or
I like [really bad idea redacted by moderator]. Wheee!
Deleting unflattering (but accurate) information will probably backfire on the organization. Instead of censoring negative content, try addressing the concern being identified. Think of an impolite forum post as customer feedback. Does the poster have a valid point? Can you fix the problem that’s been identified?
I hate your scooters. They don’t come in enough colors. And they suck.
What colors would you like to see? We do have two dozen available, see this list.
– Joe in TechComm
The life-or-death issues around Mr. Rohde’s kidnapping are relatively straightforward. We are likely to have much more difficult judgment calls in typical technical communication. Imagine, for example, that information were being suppressed because it criticized security arrangements and not because of safety concerns for the reporter. In that case, I think we can agree that Wikipedia’s response would have (and should have) been different. What would an equivalent scenario look like in your organization?
This post is Part 2 of our Flare 5 DITA feature review. Part 1 provides an overview and discusses localization and map files.
Cross-references and other links
I imported DITA content that contained three xref elements (I shortened the IDs below for readability):
Reference to another step in the same topic:
<stepresult>
Result of step. And here’s a reference to the <xref href=”task1.xml#task_8F2F9″ type=”li” format=”dita” scope=”local”>third step</xref>.
</stepresult>
Reference to another topic:
<stepresult>
Result text. And here’s a link to the other task topic:
<xref href=”task2.xml#task_8F2F94 type=”task” format=”dita” scope=”local”></xref>.
</stepresult>
Link to web site:
<cmd>
Here’s another step. Here’s a link with external scope:
<xref href=”https://scriptorium.com” scope=”external” format=”html”>www.scriptorium.com</xref>
</cmd>
All three came across in the WebHelp I generated from Flare:
On the link to the topic, Flare applied a default cross-reference format that included the word “See” and the quotation marks around the topic’s name. You can modify the stylesheet for the Flare project to change that text and styling.
Relationship tables
DITA relationship tables let you avoid the drudgery of manually inserting (and managing!) related topic links. Based on the relationships you specify in the table, related topic links are generated in your output.
I imported a simple map file with a relationship table into Flare and created WebHelp. The output included the links to the related topics. I then tinkered with the project’s stylesheet and its language skin for English to change the default appearance and text of the heading for related concepts. The sentence-style capitalization and red text for “Related concepts” in the following screen shot reflect my modifications:
conrefs
DITA conrefs let you reuse chunks of content. I created a simple conref for a note and then imported the map file with one DITA file that contains the actual note and a second file that references the note via a conref.
Flare happily imported the information and turned the conref into a Flare snippet. It’s worth noting that the referencing, while equivalent, is not the same. In my source DITA files, I had this:
aardvark.xml contains:
<note id=””>Do not feed the animals
Thus, we have two instances of the content in the DITA files — the original content and the content reference. In Flare, we end up with three instances — the snippet and two references to the snippet. In other words, Flare separates out the content being reused into a snippet and then references the snippet. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s worth noting.
Specialization
Specialized content is not officially supported at this point. According to MadCap, it worked for some people in testing, but not for others. If you need to publish specialized DITA content through Flare, you might consider generalizing back to standard DITA first.
Conditional processing
When you import DITA content that contains attribute values, Flare creates condition tags based on those values. I imported a map file with a topic that used the audience attribute: one paragraph had that attribute set to user, and another had the attribute set to admin. When I looked in the Project Organizer at the conditions for the WebHelp target, conditions based on my audience values were listed:
I set Audience.admin to Exclude and Audience.user to Include, and then I created WebHelp. As expected, the output included the user-level paragraph and excluded the admin-level one.
DITA support level
Flare supports DITA v1.1.
Our verdict
If you’re looking for a path to browser-based help for your DITA content, you should consider the new version of Flare. Without a lot of effort, we were able to create WebHelp from imported DITA content. Flare handled DITA constructs (such as conrefs and relationship tables) without any problems in our testing. Our only quibble was with the TOC entries in the WebHelp (as mentioned in Part 1), and we’ve heard that MadCap will likely be addressing that issue in the future.
We didn’t evaluate how Flare handles DITA-to-PDF conversion. However, if the PDF process in Flare works as smoothly as the one for WebHelp, Flare could provide a compelling alternative to modifying the XSL-FO templates that come with the Open Toolkit or adopting one of the commercial FO solutions for rendering PDF output.
[Disclosure: Scriptorium is a Certified Flare Instructor.] [Full disclosure: We’re also an Adobe Authorized Training Center, a JustSystems Services Partner, a founding member of TechComm Alliance, a North Carolina corporation, and a woman-owned business. Dog people outnumber cat people in our office. Can I start my post now?]
These days, most of our work uses XML and/or DITA as foundational technologies. As a result, our interest in help authoring tools such as Flare and RoboHelp has been muted. However, with the release of Flare 5, MadCap has added support for DITA. This review looks at the DITA features in the new product. (If you’re looking for a discussion of all the new features, I suggest you wander over to Paul Pehrson’s review. You might also read the official MadCap press release.)
The initial coverage reminds me a bit of this:
(My web site stats prove that you people are suckers for video. Also, I highly recommend TubeChop for extracting a portion of a YouTube video.)
Let’s take a look at the most important Flare/DITA integration pieces.
New output possibilities
After importing DITA content into Flare, you can publish to any of the output formats that Flare supports. Most important, in my opinion, is the option to publish cross-browser, cross-platform HTML-based help (“web help”) because the DITA Open Toolkit does not provide this output. We have created web help systems by customizing the Open Toolkit output, and that approach does make sense in certain situations, but the option to publish through Flare is appealing for several reasons:
Flare provides a default template for web help output (actually, three of them: WebHelp, WebHelp Plus, and WebHelp AIR)
Customizing Flare output is easier than configuring the Open Toolkit
I took some DITA files, opened them in Flare, made some minimal formatting changes, and published to WebHelp. The result is shown here:
Not bad at all for 10 minutes’ work. I added the owl logo and scriptorium.com in the header, changed the default font to sans-serif, and made the heading purple. Tweaking CSS in Flare’s visual editor is straightforward, and changes automatically cascade (sorry) across all the project files.
Ease of configuration
Flare wins. Next topic. (Don’t believe me? Read the DITA Open Toolkit User Guide — actually, just skim the table of contents.)
Language support
The Open Toolkit wins on volume and for right-to-left languages; Flare wins on easy configuration (I’m detecting a theme here.)
Out of the box, both Flare and the Open Toolkit provide strings (that is, localized output for interface elements such as the “Table of Contents” label) for simplified and traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portugese, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai (I have omitted variations such as Canadian French).
Beyond that, we have the following:
Right-to-left language support: Only in the Open Toolkit
Language strings provided by the Open Toolkit but not by Flare: Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Estonian, Hebrew, Croatian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
Ease of adding support for a new language: Flare wins. In the Open Toolkit, you modify an XML file; in Flare, you use the Language Skin Editor (although it looks as though you could choose to modify the resource file directory directly if you really wanted to)
Thus, if you need Hebrew or Arabic publishing, you can’t use Flare. The Open Toolkit also provides default support for more languages.
Map files
I imported a map file into Flare and published. Then, I changed the map file to include a simple nested ditamap. Here is what I found:
Flare recognized the map file and the nested map file and built TOC files in Flare with the correct relationships.
Inexplicably, the nested map file was designated the primary TOC. I speculate that this might be because the nested map file was first in alphabetical order. I changed the parent map file to be the primary TOC to fix this. I don’t know what would happen for a more complex set of maps, but I am concerned.
Flare inserted an extra layer into the output TOC where the nested map is found.
The titles generated in the TOC are different in Flare than they are through the DITA Open Toolkit (see below).
I generated the output for my map file (the nested map is the “The decision to implement” section in this screen shot) through the DITA Open Toolkit and got the following XHTML output: Then, I imported the same map file into Flare, generated WebHelp, and got the following TOC output:
Notice that:
The TOC text is different (!!). The DITA Open Toolkit uses the text of the topic titles from inside the topic files. Flare uses the text of the @navtitle attribute in the map file. My topic titles and @navtitles don’t match because I created the map file, then changed a bunch of topic titles. The map file didn’t keep up with the new titles (because it doesn’t matter in the Open Toolkit), but it appears to matter for Flare. The entry in the map file for the first item is:
You probably know that Scriptorium conducted an industry survey on structured authoring earlier this year. The report, The State of Structure in Technical Communication, is available in our online store for $200.
There is a cheaper option to get the highlights. On Tuesday, June 16, at 1 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be delivering a one-hour webinar that highlights the most important findings.
Coming in July and August
Expect to see additional webinars in cooperation with our TechComm Alliance partners, Cherryleaf and HyperWrite. We are also welcoming Jack Molisani of ProSpring, who will offer excellent and candid career development advice. Watch this space for details about these upcoming events. Scriptorium consultants will also be offering additional content.
Recorded events
Two of our recent webinars are now available for download:
Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit
Documentation as Conversation
Each webinar lasts about one hour and is $20, either live or recorded. You can register for the Tuesday webcast and download recordings in our online store.
(Warning: The recorded webcast files are quite large.)
About a year ago, we added Google Analytics to our web site. I have done some research to see what posts were the most popular in the past year:
The clear winner was our FrameMaker 9 review. With 21 comments, I think it was also the most heavily commented post. Interestingly, the post itself is little more than a pointer to the PDF file that contains the actual review.
InDesign CS4 = Hannibal post, which discussed InDesign’s encroachment on traditional FrameMaker features.
A surprise…a post from 2006 in which Mark Baker discussed the merits (or lack thereof) of DITA in To DITA or not to DITA
Our readers appear to like clever headlines, because I don’t think the content quality explains the high numbers for posts such as:
We noticed this pattern recently, when a carefully crafted, meticulously written post was ignored in favor of a throwaway post dashed off in minutes with a catchy title (Death to Recipes!).
For useful, thoughtful advice on blogging, I refer you to Tom Johnson and Rich Maggiani. I, however, have a new set of blogging recommendations:
We are joining with a couple of other technical communication companies to form the TechComm Alliance:
Three companies—Cherryleaf Ltd., HyperWrite, and Scriptorium Publishing—are forming TechComm Alliance to help us handle technical communication projects around the world. We are located in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, respectively, and each company has customers in both its home location and in other countries. TechComm Alliance will make it easier to work with global companies that need services worldwide.
How will this work? We expect to:
Work together on large projects that require support in multiple locations. For instance, Scriptorium might be implementing structured authoring for a U.S. company that also has operations in Europe and Australia. During rollout, instead of sending a Scriptorium consultant around the world, we partner with Cherryleaf for the training in Europe and with HyperWrite for the training in Australia. The result? Our customer saves on travel expenses, and our consultants spend less time in airplanes.
Refer projects to each other. Each company has (and will continue to have) clients around the world. When we feel that a local presence would benefit the customer, we can refer the project to our alliance partners.
Produce webinars and other events together. I’d like for Scriptorium customers to benefit from the expertise of our partners, and we are working on joint webinars.
We have added Documentation as Conversation, presented by Anne Gentle, to our upcoming webinars. Anne is scheduled to present on June 9 at 11 a.m. Eastern time:
Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates. This talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, with the help of social media technology. I’ll discuss the topics in my new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. I’ll describe the use of in-person Book Sprints that combine wikis and community events to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals
Anne is an expert, perhaps the expert, on using wikis and other social media to extend traditional documentation efforts. She’s also an excellent speaker, so I hope you’ll join us for this session.
PS We are working on additional topics and looking for more speakers. Do you have topics you would like us to cover? Please let us know. We are working on a couple of sessions on document conversion.
I love food. I enjoy cooking and I especially enjoy eating. One of my favorite web sites is epicurious.com, and the kitchen shelf devoted to cookbooks sags alarmingly. Many Saturday mornings, you will find me here.
But I am not happy about how recipes have insinuated themselves into my work life. For some reason, the recipe is the default example of structured content. Look at what happens when you search Google for xml recipe example. Recipes are everywhere, not unlike high fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, I am not immune to the XML recipe infiltration myself.
I understand the appeal. Recipes are:
highly structured content
well understood
But I think the example is getting a little tired and wilted. Let’s try working with something new. Try out a new kind of lettuce, er, example. This week, I’m trying to write a very basic introduction to structured authoring, and I’m paralyzed by my inability to think of any non-recipe examples.
I’m considering using a glossary as an example. After all, it’s a highly structure piece of content whose organization is well understood. Maybe I’ll use food items as my glossary entries. Baby steps…
PS It’s totally unrelated, but this article about two chefs eating their way through Durham (“nine restaurants in one night, at least five hours of eating and drinking”) is quite fun.
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