Archive for August 2010
Technical Book Review — "The Little, Brown Handbook"
The Little, Brown Handbook by Pearson Longman (LBH) is a heavy book (literally) for a very good reason: it’s got too much in it! This trade-paperback size book has a whole library of information about writing good prose stuffed into 966 pages. It’s a must source for anyone who writes, as far as I’m concerned.…
Read MoreHow to Eliminate Uneven Underlining in Adobe FrameMaker
© Ugur Akinci In Adobe FrameMaker underlining a sentence or paragraph produces uneven results if the fonts do not have the same size. Here is an example: To eliminate this ugly-looking variation in line width, follow these easy steps: 1) Select the FrameMaker text. 2) Display your Character Designer (Ctrl + D, or select Format…
Read MoreCompare Help Authoring Tools with HAT-Matrix
© 2010 Ugur Akinci Here is an interesting web site to compare your favorite HATs (Help Authoring Tools): HAT-Matrix The site has 2 drawbacks: 1) Only those vendors who paid to be on the site are represented (WebWorks, for example, is missing). 2) The owners of the site rely on the vendors’ own product descriptions…
Read MoreDuke University offers Technical Communication Certificate
Duke University needs no introduction. It’s one of the premiere learning institutions of the nation. Not only Duke has a great technical communication certificate program but it also turns out that one of our regular readers and contributors, Larry Kunz is on the Duke faculty teaching tech comm. Larry holds a Masters Certificate in Project…
Read MoreFrameMaker – How to Easily Update the Page Header and Footer Information in all Chapters of a Book
Say you have a FrameMaker book consisting of 100 chapters. Your client has asked you to update the book and insert a “New Edition 2010” notice to every page footer. How would you do it? As usual, there’s a hard way and a relatively easier way. The hard way is no secret: you open every…
Read MoreThe Logical Steps to follow to Create an Adobe FrameMaker Book
© Ugur Akinci To create an Adobe FrameMaker book from scratch you need to follow a logical sequence of steps, each of which is fairly easy to perform once you get the hang of it. Here is a brief outline and a diagram to make the process clearer: 1) First create a TEMPLATE for the…
Read MoreHow to Create, Insert and Edit User-Defined Variables in RoboHelp
User-defined variables are one of the many wonderful features of Adobe RoboHelp. When you first launch RoboHelp, the STARTER screen offers many types of help projects to create: (Click on images to enlarge them) All these project types offer a User Defined Variables pod. Some of these pods come with pre-defined default user-defined variables; and…
Read MoreHow to Add a FrameMaker Drop-Down Sub-Menu to an Image
Follow these steps to add a drop-down sub-menu to an Adobe FrameMaker image. 1) Do everything described in this post and create a drop-down menu attached to your image. 2) Then, go to your Reference Pages by either using the Esc+v+R shortcut or selecting View > Reference Pages from the menu. 3) On any reference…
Read MoreHow to Combine Two PDF Documents in Adobe Acrobat Pro 9
© 2010 Ugur Akinci This method can save the day if you were asked to create to separate PDF documents and then combine them; or add a new PDF document to an existing one. 1) Create your first PDF document. In this case, I created it in Word 2010 and saved it as PDF (Document1.pdf).…
Read MoreHow to Add a FrameMaker Drop-Down Menu to an Image
Introduction Would you like to add a 1- or 2-level drop-down menu to any image in your Adobe FrameMaker technical document Follow These Easy Steps It’s easy and this is how: 1) Create a new FrameMaker (FM) document or open an existing one. 2) Either add a new image or select an existing one. For…
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