Sleep Formatting

The irrational sense that your sleep affects an important unfinished document. Perhaps your pillow is a heading that won't align. Did you sleep through the document structure and not complete the title right? Was there a bibliographical entry for your last dream? Was it CMS?

The Web is my Print Page

Much of the writing I do is aimed at the web and its damn familiar.

They really were very neat and fast!

Beattie, H. S. and R. A. Rahenkamp. "IBM Typewriter
Innovation." IBM J. Res. Develop. Vol. 25, no. 5. Sept. 1981

I'm just old enough to have seen expectations shift from typewriter to word processor. People who were talking about IBM Selectric balls as fantastic technology (and they were) all of a sudden ran into the benefits of a computer. If the Selectric ball had a 100 facets, each representing a new character, the computer had a million options, each representing a whole new method.

Twenty plus years ago, when I was in high school,  I remember a host of word processors and they had mysterious codes that you could type between "escape characters". These wouldn't be seen by your audience, they'd go to the printer.

HTML is the new printer code.

The printer was the last hurrah of the page as a paradigm.

Some people had wide carriage printers or elaborate needs. Some people printed on forms - paper alignment was crucial. At the time this was very complex stuff and most of us understood that the word processor was a miracle for doing so much work for us. Even today this is a core feature of most offices.

Maybe this keyboard could have typed
 a Web Page. It sure had a enough keys.

US Department of Commerce. "Automatic Typographic-Quality
Typesetting Techniques: A State-of-the-Art Review." National
Bureau of Standards Monograph. Vol. 99. April 7, 1967.

Monotype keyboard

Although the page is not going away soon, it is fundamentally different than the web.

Programs like RoboHelp from Adobe and Flare from Madcap are like blogging software on steroids.

As I type this, thankful to the good people at Google, I don't have to care where the margins are. I don't have to enter numbers or codes. I can concentrate on writing. This is the aim for the next generation of word processors. Its just that now the bar has been raised. I can select paper size for a printer but I can also select screen size for a Tablet or IPhone.

I think the reality of authoring web pages for the various newly established formats and the very different needs of a web document are just beginning to percolate.

References

A cool site for information on text

http://www.hello-object.com/

Adobe RoboHelp

I didn't know what to think about RoboHelp. Is it a document or a web page or ????

The cool thing about it is that it's all of the above and probably stuff I haven't discovered yet. Single source writing takes some brain cells. Think of it this way. Imagine that there is data you care about a whole lot more for its own sake than any other reason.

Think about your resume. Do you care if it's shoved in a mail slot, delivered by Gmail, called up in a web search or emailed as a PDF? Of course you don't - as long as it gets to the reader?

Ok, now imagine there were a thousand people who might like to read your resume but they only accept it in a different format. Sucks huh....

This is the situation businesses are in every day, only their data is much more complicated than a resume. Imagine if you could avoid rewriting your data every time you needed to change formats. Keep your data in a living store where you didn't have to redo everything just because someone wanted a web page or a pdf or ????

That's what is so exciting about RoboHelp. It really changes document writing because you don't have a bunch of different documents. You have a central adaptive document that changes for each type of delivery format. I can see dollar signs with this program. Who prints twelve million copies today? I won't. I'm going to build a solid project in RoboHelp and then be ready for whoever wants my resume, however they want it.

Nobody says there won't be updates and work ahead but it will be a whole lot less work than I used to think it would be. Everything will be up to date and ready for what it needs to be next. My resume gets dressed for an interview just like I do. It just ends up as a PDF, Word File, Book, or Web Page. Its all still my data - I just dress it in a new suit.

Thanks Adobe. 

Adobe Framemaker

It might make me sound like a newbie but I was really excited to work with FrameMaker. People I know in the industry that work with long documents are always talking about 'Frame'. Watching it patch together a bunch of files into a seamless document was magic.

I'm glad I had some advice making it work but it wasn't super hard. 

I think one of the really exciting things about writing is the potential. If you have a bright idea you really don't want to hamstring it by putting it in a format you have to change later or worse watch it get corrupt just because it's too big. I hope all my projects are important, revisited and never have to worry about limits of size or chapter weirdness or page numbering hassles. I don't have to pull my hair out with Frame, which is good because I don't have a lot to begin with :).

Adobe Reader & Acrobat

Adobe Reader might have been the first 3rd party software installed on your machine. It seems everything is in PDF format. The format itself, is the best one for sharing text with people I know.

Seneca has a printing service that is great when you finish an assignment way way too early. I just can't run a printer at 3am! Even though the service is a life saver, I never know what the actual printer will be. That means that I don't have the print driver on my laptop. I learned quickly to have it ready in PDF.

Acrobat is also great for editing and creating PDF's. This isn't startling news when you consider Adobe invented the PDF :). But what I really love, is not having to care what printer is going to render the file. It always looks good. At 3am, I'm grateful

I also really like editing in Acrobat. It handles comments intelligently with colours and it keeps track of who said what. And since I can tell if someone changes my original text, and I'm a happy editor.

And with Reader being everywhere.. I don't have to worry if people have my word processor.

Adobe, Thanks for being Suite!

Working with Adobe TechSuite 4

I don't imagine I'm the only one who ever had too much to do. :)

The demands of the world, my family and school take a bit of concentration, an amount of intelligence and a whole bunch of energy. It's a pleasure when something just works.

At Seneca, I've had the pleasure of working with Framemaker, Robohelp and Acrobat. They're bundled in Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4. Here's a link. You may have used Acrobat in one way or another, but the suite has some other very cool software.


Suffice it to say...

• When I wanted something to print properly on any printer I used Acrobat.
• When I want something to be there for Web, or Print, or Chm Help file I used RoboHelp.
• And when I was worried about a document that might get very large (ie most of the serious ones) I saved myself from having to baby Microsoft Word  and went right to FrameMaker.

The bright side of this course has been that Adobe Tech Comm Suite 4 has really spoiled me. Everything I wanted was "Programs>Adobe>" and then my solution. The rise of the office suite is really amazing when it bundles prices and collects solutions. Even when I'm falling apart Tech Suite has picked up the pieces.


Thanks Adobe,

I mean it.

Honest Start

Greetings to everyone!

This first blog is a world of words to an empty room:).

I am hopefully looking at a transformative process going into the future and I thought I would use this blog to escape myself and keep myself honest. This is the beginning.