Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 software, an upgrade of its solution for authoring, reviewing, managing, and publishing rich technical information and training content across multiple channels. Using the suite, technical communicators can create documentation, training materials and Web-enabled user assistance containing both traditional text and 3D designs along with rich media, including Adobe Flash Player compatible video, AVI, MP3 and SWF file support. The enhanced suite includes Adobe FrameMaker 9, the latest version of Adobe’s technical authoring and DITA publishing solution, Adobe RoboHelp 8, a major upgrade to Adobe’s help system and knowledge base authoring tool, Adobe Captivate 4, an upgrade to Adobe’s eLearning authoring tool, and Photoshop CS4, a new addition to the suite. The suite also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended and Adobe Presenter 7. Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 is a complete solution that offers improved productivity along with support for standards-based authoring including support for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML-based standard for authoring, producing and delivering technical information. It enables the creation of rich content and publishing through multiple channels, including XML/HTML, print, PDF, WSF, WebHelp, Adobe FlashHelp, Microsoft HTML Help, OracleHelp, JavaHelp and Adobe AIR. FrameMaker 9 offers a new user interface. It supports hierarchical books and DITA 1.1, and makes it easier to author topic-based content. In addition, FrameMaker 9 provides a capability to aggregate unstructured, structured and DITA content in a seamless workflow. Using a PDF based review workflow, authors can import and incorporate feedback. Adobe RoboHelp 8 allows technical communicators to author XHTML-compliant professional help content. The software also supports Lists and Tables, a new CSS editor, Pages and Templates, and a new search functionality. The Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 is immediately available in North America. Estimated street price for the suite is US$1899. FrameMaker 9, RoboHelp 8 and Captivate 4 are available as standalone products as well. Estimated street price for FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 8 is US$999 for each, US$799 for Captivate 4. http://www.adobe.com
Category: Publishing & media (Page 31 of 52)
Today I will address a question I have grappled with for years, can non-structured authoring tools, e.g., word processors, can be used effectively to create structured content? I have been involved for some time in projects for various state legislatures and publishers trying to use familiar word processing tools to create XML content. So far, based on my experiences, I think the answer is a definite “maybe”. Let me explain and offer some rules for your consideration.
First understand that there is a range of validation and control possible in structured editing, from supporting a very loose data model to very strict data models. A loose data model might enforce a vocabulary of element type names but very little in the way of sequence and occurrence rules or data typing that would be required in a strict data model. Also remember that the rules expressed in your data model should be based on your business drivers such as regulatory compliance and internal policy. Therefore:
Rule number 1: The stricter your data model and business requirements are, the more you need a real structured editor. IMHO only very loose data models can effectively be supported in unstructured authoring tools.
Also, unstructured tools use a combination of formatting oriented structured elements and styles to emulate a structured editing experience. Styles tend to be very flat and have limited processing controls that can be applied to them. For instance, a heading style in an unstructured environment usually is applied only to the bold headline which is followed by a new style for the paragraphs that follow. In a structured environment, the heading and paragraphs would have a container element, perhaps chapter, that clearly indicates the boundaries of the chapter. Therefore structured data is less ambiguous than unstructured data. Ambiguity is easier for humans to deal with than computers which like everything explicitly marked up. It is important to know who is going to consume, process, manage, or manipulate the data. If these processes are mostly manual ones, then unstructured tools may be suitable. If you hope to automate a lot of the processing, such as page formatting, transforms to HTML and other formats, or reorganizing the data, then you will quickly find the limitations of unstructured tools. Therefore:
Rule Number 2: Highly automated and streamline processes usually required content to be created in a true structured editor. And very flexible content that is consumed or processed mostly by humans may support the use of unstructured tools.
Finally, the audience for the tools may influence how structured the content creation tools can be. If your user audience includes professional experts, such as legislative attorneys, you may not be able to convince them to use a tool that behaves differently than the word processor they are used to. They need to focus on the intellectual act or writing and how that law might affect other laws. They don’t want to have to think about the editing tool and markup it uses the way some production editors might. It is also good to remember that working under tight deadlines also impacts how much structure can be “managed” by the authors. Therefore:
Rule Number 3: Structured tools may be unsuitable for some users due to the type of writing they perform or the pressures of the environment in which they work.
By the way, a structured editing tool may be an XML structured editor, but it could also be a Web form, application dialog, Wiki, or some other interface that can enforce the rules expressed in the data model. But this is a topic for another day. </>
Here at Gilbane Boston, we just heard from Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution. His talk described the Smithsonian Institution’s current Web and New Media strategy process and the cultural, technical, and organizational implications of the vision of a Smithsonian Commons–a critical-mass of content, services, and tools designed to fuel innovation and stimulate engagement with the world’s scientific and cultural knowledge.
Many of the efforts are nascent, but this project on Flickr gives you a nice idea idea of the potential for this kind of effort.
I always took footnotes for granted. You need them as you’re writing, you insert an indicator at the right place and it points the reader to an amplification, a citation, an off-hand comment, or something — but it’s out of the way, a distraction to the point you’re trying to make.
Some documents don’t need them, but some require them (e.g., scholarly documents, legal documents). In those documents, the footnotes contain such important information that, as Barry Bealer suggests in When footnotes are the content, “the meat [is] in the footnotes.”
The web doesn’t make it easy to represent footnotes. Footnotes on the Web argues that HTML is barely up to the task of presenting footnotes in any effective form.
But if you were to recreate the whole thing from scratch, without static paper as a model, how would you model footnotes?
In a document, a footnote is composed of two pieces of related information. One is the point that you’re trying to make, typically a new point. The other is some pre-existing reference material that presumably supports your point. If it is always the new material that points at the existing, supporting material, then we’re building an information taxonomy bottom up — with the unfortunate property that entering at higher levels will prevent us from seeing lower levels through explicitly-stated links.
To be fair, there are good reasons for connections to be bidirectional. Unidirectional links are forgivable for the paper model, with its inherently temporal life. But the WWW is more malleable, and bidirectional links don’t have to be published at the same time as the first end of the link. In this sense, HTML’s linking mechanism, the ‘<a href=”over_there”>’ construct is fundamentally broken. Google’s founders exploited just this characteristic of the web to build their company on a solution to a problem that needn’t have been.
And people who have lived through the markup revolution from the days of SGML and HyTime know that it shouldn’t have been.
But footnotes still only point bottom up. Fifteen to twenty years on, many of the deeper concepts of the markup revolution are still waiting to flower.
Clickability announced the immediate availability of the Clickability Media Solution. The Media Solution provides a centrally managed SaaS content repository that enables large media companies to share digital content across their entire organization and publish it to multiple devices and web channels. Companies of all sizes can leverage the multi-tenant content repository as a hub for innovative content sharing, syndication and distribution strategies. Additional benefits to companies large and small include reduced operational costs through greater efficiencies and the ability to build active social media communities. The solution is designed to maximize the value of every piece of content in a customer’s repository. Content can be tagged and annotated for search and reuse. Assets can be linked and shared across channels and publications. The repository allows companies to create targeted microsites or regional portals that rely on metadata to automatically populate with appropriate content and contextual links. Clickability also offers interactive features, which includes social networking, blogging, video serving, ticketing, personalized calendars, site customization and an on-demand ad server that ties ads to specific sections and pages of a site. http://www.clickability.com
MadCap Software announced its roadmap for supporting the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard. With MadCap, authors will have a complete authoring and publishing suite of tools for creating, managing, translating and publishing DITA content. The products will use MadCap’s XML editor, which provides an graphical user interface for creating featured documentation that hides the XML being generated below. In the first phase of its DITA initiative, MadCap Software will add DITA support to four products: MadCap Flare, MadCap Blaze, MadCap Analyzer for reporting, MadCap Lingo. With MadCap Flare and Blaze, authors will be able to import DITA projects and topics as raw XML content, and using the XML editor, change the style sheets to get the desired look and structure. Authors will then have the option to publish the output as DITA content; print formats, such as Microsoft Word, DOCX and XPS or Adobe FrameMaker, PDF and AIR; and a range of HTML and XHTML online formats MadCap Analyzer will work directly with DITA topics and projects to allow authors to analyze and report on the content. Similarly, MadCap Lingo will import data directly from DITA topics and projects, so that it can be translated. The translated material can be published as DITA content or exported to a Flare or Blaze project. In the second phase, MadCap will enable authors to natively create and edit DITA topics in Flare and Blaze, as well as MadCap X-Edit, MadCap’s software family for creating short documents, contributing content to other documents, and reviewing content. Like Flare and Blaze, X-Edit will also support the ability to import and publish DITA information. In the third phase, MadCap will add DITA support to its forthcoming MadCap Team Server. This will make it possible to manage and share DITA content across teams and projects, as well as schedule DITA publishing. http://www.madcapsoftware.com
By David Lipsey, Managing Director, Entertainment & Media, FTI
Can anyone deliver customized content to its customers – in print, on the Web in rich applications, in social networking or to wireless media? To make matters more challenging, what if your customers are two-to-five year olds? Well, Sesame Workshop recently had to address this test to keep its brand relevant to precocious preschoolers. In fact, this non-profit organization behind Sesame Street took the bold view that multi-channel publishing is the future of the Workshop, and recognized that online will become its primary channel of distribution down the line. At the upcoming Gilbane Boston Conference (link to information on session), I will moderate a panel of multi-channel publishing experts, including the VP charged with Sesame Workshop’s internet initiative. We will provide you with the latest in content delivery, opportunities to serve more users and more applications, and insights to show that yes, almost anyone can do it. Please join me, Joe Bachana from DPCI (an industry leader in his own right) and the ever-innovative O’Reilly Press for a didactic and enlightening discussion that will get you mulling over ideas for enhancing your brand experience for customers.
So a number of client projects recently have me looking for certain info and tools. If you have some thoughts about any of these, please do get in touch or post a comment here.
In no particular order:
- Does anyone have experience with the XSL-FO stylesheets that have been created for previewing content encoded with the NLM article DTD? In addition, has anyone extended the stylesheets to work with the book tag set?
- In a related note, has anyone tried the Word 2007 add-in for the NLM DTD? Experiences? Good, bad, or indifferent? I also wonder if anyone has tried extending it to reflect customizations to the DTD/schema?
- Finally, I am looking to talk to users who have created DITA content with Microsoft Word, either one of the commercial add-ins like Content Mapper or a custom add-in.
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