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Humor Opinion

More cowbell!

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:

  1. 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.
  2. InDesign CS4 = Hannibal post, which discussed InDesign’s encroachment on traditional FrameMaker features.
  3. 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:

  1. Write catchy titles
  2. Have an opinion, preferably an outrageous one
  3. More cowbell

Sarah O'Keefe
June 4, 2009
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Webinar

Documentation as conversation webinar

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.

Register for Documentation as Conversation ($20)

See all upcoming webinars

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.

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Sarah O'Keefe
May 22, 2009
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Conferences

DocTrain’s demise and a challenge to presenters

Unfortunate news in my inbox this morning:

I regret to announce that DocTrain DITA Indianapolis is cancelled. DocTrain/PUBSNET Inc is shutting down.

As a business owner, messages like this strike fear in my heart. If it could happen to them…gulp. (This might be a good time to mention that we are ALWAYS looking for projects, so send them on over, please.) My condolences to the principals at DocTrain.

Meanwhile, I’m also thinking about what we can do in place of the event. I had a couple of presentations scheduled for DocTrain DITA, and Simon Bate was planning a day-long workshop on DITA Open Toolkit configuration.

So, here’s the plan. We are going to offer a couple of webinars based on the sessions we were planning to do at DocTrain DITA:

Each webinar is $20. We may record the webinars and make the recordings available later, but I’m not making any promises. Registration is limited to 50 people.

Here’s the challenge part: If you were scheduled to present at DocTrain DITA (or weren’t but have something useful to say), please set up a webcast of your presentation. It would be ultra-cool if we could replicate the event online (I know that the first week in June was cleared on your schedule!), but let’s get as much of this content as possible available. If you do not have a way to offer a webinar, let me know, and I’ll work with you to host it through Scriptorium.

And here’s my challenge to those of you who like to attend conferences: Please consider supporting these online events. If $20 is truly more than you can afford, contact me.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 18, 2009
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Conferences

Life in the desert

Last week, I attended the annual DocTrain West event, which was held this year in Palm Springs, California.

Weather in Palm Springs was spectacular as always with highs in the 80s during the day. Some of my more northerly friends seemed a bit shell-shocked by the sudden change from snow and slush to sun and sand. (North Carolina was 40 degrees when I left, so that was a nice change for me as well.)

Scott Abel did his usual fine job of organizing and somehow being omnipresent.

I promised to post my session slides. The closing keynote was mostly images and is probably not that useful without audio, so I’m going to point you to an article that covers similar ground (What do Movable Type and XML Have in Common, PDF link).

I have embedded the slides from my DITA to PDF session below.

Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing

View more presentations from Scriptorium.

I have also posted the InDesign template file and the XSL we built to preprocess the DITA XML into something that InDesign likes on our wiki. Note that running the XSL requires a working configuration of the DITA Open Toolkit. For more information, refer to the DITA to InDesign page on our wiki.

Sarah O'Keefe
March 23, 2009
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Opinion

I am not a Pod Person

Confession time: I don’t like podcasts.

And I think I know why.

I am a voracious reader. And by voracious, I mean that I often cook with a stirring spoon in one hand and a book in the other. I go through at least a dozen books a months (booksfree is my friend).

So why don’t I like podcasts?

  1. They’re inconvenient. I don’t have a lot of interrupted listening time, other than at the gym. And frankly, there’s a bizarre cognitive dissonance listening to Tom Johnson interview Bogo Vatovec while I’m lifting weights. I tried listening to a crafting podcast, but that was worse — my brain can’t handle auditory input describing crocheting techniques while simultaneously operating an elliptical machine. So I went back to Dr. Phil on the gym TV. It may rot my brain, but at least it doesn’t hurt.
  2. They’re inefficient. I can listen to a 30-minute podcast, or I can skim the equivalent text in 90 seconds.

I’ve been thinking about what would make a podcast more appealing to me, and realized that it’s not really the medium I object to, it’s my inability to control the delivery.

I’ll become a podcasting proponent when I perceive these properties:

  1. Better navigation. Podcasts, like other content, need to be divided into logical chunks. These chunks should be accessible via a table of contents and an index.
  2. Ability to skim. Podcasts need to provide the audio equivalent of flipping pages in a book or scrolling through a document while only reading the headings.

Depending on the software you use to consume podcasts, you may already have some of the features. For instance, a colleague told me that he listened to my recent DITA webinar at five times the normal speed:

I wanted to let you know about something in particular. I listened to it at 5x fast fwd in Windows Media Player while drinking a coke. My heart is still racing. You should try it. :o)

Do you enjoy podcasts? Do you have any special techniques for managing them efficiently?

Sarah O'Keefe
February 27, 2009
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Tools

Don’t type, drag to the cmd window

I spend a good deal of time with a Windows cmd.exe window open on my desktop. If I’m not running the DITA OT, I’m testing some Perl script, or Ant, or Python, or who knows.

A few years ago (in the Windows 98 days), I discovered a nifty cmd window trick. People are consistently amazed when I demonstrate it to them. Now I’m going to share it with you.

Say you need to change directory to some long and gnarly path name. You could type the whole thing in. Or, if you have Windows Explorer open on your desktop, you can:

  1. Type “cd ” in the cmd window (the space is important).
  2. Go to Windows Explorer and find the folder you want to navigate to.
  3. Drag and drop the folder from Windows Explorer to the cmd window.

Hey presto! The path name is copied to the cmd window. What’s more, if there are spaces in the path, the path is automatically quoted.

Now you can click in the cmd window and press Enter to perform the command.

Cool! No more typing long path names for this ToolSmith.

This works for filenames too. If I’m running a Perl script that needs to work on a file way down my directory tree, I type “perl myScriptName.pl “, then drag and drop the file name from Windows Explorer into my cmd window.

I’ll keep adding more ToolSmith’s Tricks as I use them. What’s your favorite trick?

Simon Bate
February 20, 2009
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Tools

WMF…that’ll shut ’em up

Which graphics formats should you use in your documentation? For print, the traditional advice is EPS for line drawings and TIFF for screen captures and photographs. That’s still good advice. These days, you might choose PDF and PNG for the same purposes. There are caveats for each of these formats, but in general, these are excellent choices.

Of course, everybody knows to stay away from WMF, the Windows Metafile Format. WMF doesn’t handle gradients, can’t have more than 256 colors, and refuses to play nice with anything other than Windows.

Think you’re too good to hang out with WMF? For your print and online documentation, perhaps. But it may be a great choice to give to your company’s PowerPoint users.

Are you familiar with this scenario? PowerPoint User saw some graphics in your documentation and thought they would work for some sales presentations. The screen captures are easy; you just give PowerPoint User PNGs or BMPs or whatever. It’s the line drawings that are the problem. PowerPoint User doesn’t have Illustrator and has never heard of EPS. PowerPoint User says, “Can you give me a copy of those pictures in a format that I can use in PowerPoint? Oh, and can make that box purple and change that font for me first? And move that line just a little bit? And make that line thicker? And remove that entire right side of the picture and split it into two pictures?”

You want PowerPoint User to reuse the graphics; you’re all about reuse. But you have dealt with PowerPoint User before, and you know you will never get your real job done if you get pulled into the sucking vortex of PowerPoint User’s endless requests.

The secret is to give PowerPoint User the graphics in a format that can be edited from within PowerPoint (or Word): WMF. Here’s the drill that will make you a hero:

  1. Save your graphics as WMF.
  2. Place each WMF on a separate page in a PowerPoint or Word file.
  3. Tell PowerPoint User to double-click on a graphic to make it editable.(If you think your PowerPoint User is really dumb, you can double-click the graphic and respond to the dialog box asking if you want to make the drawing editable yourself before saving the file, but nobody is that dumb.)

WMF. It will make PowerPoint User go away…happy!

Sarah O'Keefe
February 20, 2009
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Conferences

Looking Fear Straight in the Eye

Have you ever been really scared? I don’t mean just the Halloween kinda scared, but really scared. That’s how I felt at the Burlington Marriott when the hotel employee delivered the box containing the workbooks for my Introduction to XMetaL and DITA workshop. He stood in the doorway, smiled, and handed me a very beat up, bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated FedEx box.

The box looked like the driver had had a flat on Route 128 and used it to prevent the truck from rolling back while jacking up the front end. It was nice and damp too. With much trepidation, I opened the box and — to my relief — found that the materials were undamaged. Whew.

Following that, Wednesday’s all-day workshop on XMetaL and DITA was smooth sailing. OK, we had a bit of a problem with powerstrips, but the helpful DocTrain folks got that taken care of. In retrospect, many of the questions I fielded in the workshop weren’t so much about DITA or XMetaL itself. Instead many of the questions were about generating output. The fact is that unless you’re willing to spend some quality time with CSS and the DITA Open Toolkit, your output from DITA will look very generic. XMetaL has a number of hooks that ease some of the pain in generating XHTML output. But even those hooks won’t save you from FO issues if you want to generate PDF output.

In my presentation on Thursday comparing XMetaL and FrameMaker support in DITA, the questions returned once again to output. Of course, this time the focus was on using FrameMaker 8.0 as a PDF engine. In workflows where content is created and maintained in XML, but then has to be delivered in PDF (or print), FrameMaker 8.0 looks like an attractive possibility. There are a few flaws in this solution (such as translating xref elements for intra-document links into live links in PDF), but users are closer to a solution than they were six months ago.

We’ve posted PDFs of the slides from both sessions on SlideShare.

You can find the Introduction to XMetaL and DITA workshop slides at:

http://www.slideshare.net/Scriptorium/xmetal-dita-workshop-presentation

The slides for the session on DITA Support in FrameMaker and XMetaL are at:

http://www.slideshare.net/Scriptorium/dita-support-in-framemaker-and-xmetal-presentation

When you’re done browsing the slides, take a look on our site for information about how we can help you with your FrameMaker, XMetaL, OT, PDF problems.

It’s not that scary.

Simon Bate
November 3, 2008
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Opinion

Why XML and structured authoring is a tough transition

Found on technicalwriter’s blog:

There are several applications that incorporate features for DITA use, such as XMetal and Altova Authentic, but how much value do they provide? (Looking over the online documentation for XMetal, you will see some pretty shaky formatting and copyfitting.)

There may well be formatting and copyfitting issues. Wouldn’t surprise me at all. But talk about missing the forest for the trees!

DITA/XML/structured authoring are important because they improve how information is stored. To question their value because somebody produced documentation using them that doesn’t look so great…let’s try an analogy:

Last week, I went to a restaurant and the food was terrible. I looked in the kitchen and saw Calphalon pots and pans. I conclude that you should not buy Calphalon because the food they produce is terrible.

The quality of your food is determined by things such as the quality of the ingredients and the skill of the chef. The pan you choose does contribute — it helps to use the right size and a high-quality pan, but to dismiss DITA because one example doesn’t look quite right is pretty much like dismissing Calphalon because somebody once cooked something that didn’t taste very good in it.

PS I like Calphalon. And I have produced my share of problematic entrees.
PPS DITA is not right for everybody.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 4, 2007
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News

Friends in new places

We’re pleased to announce that we have joined XMetaL’s Partner Program as a Certified Service Provider.

We will not be reselling XMetaL software, but we will begin offering XMetaL classes this summer.

This is really a customer-driven decision — we have clients asking us to develop XML and DITA implementations with XMetaL as the core authoring tool.

Sarah O'Keefe
April 2, 2007
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