Month: December 2009

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Adobe FrameMaker: Dictionary-Style Running Heads

by Barbara Binder 

If you are creating reference materials like a dictionary, glossary or telephone directory, you may be called on to produce "live" running heads, but with a twist. FrameMaker's Running H/F 1 variables are all set to go gather paragraphs from a document and display them in a running head, but the assumption is that you want the first paragraph from the page.

For example, if page two has three Heading1s, and you set your variable to <$paratext[Heading1]>, FrameMaker will pull the first Heading1 off the page, and will ignore the other two. In reference materials, that will work great for the left page header, but you may find it helpful to pull the last Heading1 off of the right hand pages, to show the range of information that appears on the facing pages spread. Here's how:

  1. Set the Running H/F 1 variable on the left page to <$paratext[Heading1]>.
  2. Set the Running H/F 2 variable on the right page to <$paratext[+,Heading1]>.

That's it! The plus sign (+) tells FrameMaker to find the last paragraph on the page matching the tag rather than the first paragraph.

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If you are new to FrameMaker and want to get up to speed quickly, join IconLogic's instructor-led, online Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker 9 class. Too elementary for your skill level? How about the Advanced FrameMaker 9 class? Hope to "see" you there.

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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.Adobe FrameMaker: Dictionary-Style Running Heads

by Barbara Binder 

If you are creating reference materials like a dictionary, glossary or telephone directory, you may be called on to produce "live" running heads, but with a twist. FrameMaker's Running H/F 1 variables are all set to go gather paragraphs from a document and display them in a running head, but the assumption is that you want the first paragraph from the page.

For example, if page two has three Heading1s, and you set your variable to <$paratext[Heading1]>, FrameMaker will pull the first Heading1 off the page, and will ignore the other two. In reference materials, that will work great for the left page header, but you may find it helpful to pull the last Heading1 off of the right hand pages, to show the range of information that appears on the facing pages spread. Here's how:

  1. Set the Running H/F 1 variable on the left page to <$paratext[Heading1]>.
  2. Set the Running H/F 2 variable on the right page to <$paratext[+,Heading1]>.

That's it! The plus sign (+) tells FrameMaker to find the last paragraph on the page matching the tag rather than the first paragraph.

***


If you are new to FrameMaker and want to get up to speed quickly, join IconLogic's instructor-led, online Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker 9 class. Too elementary for your skill level? How about the Advanced FrameMaker 9 class? Hope to "see" you there.

***

About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

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Writing & Grammar Workshop: How Not to Start a Sentence


Do not start a sentence with an expletive. I am not talking about bad-words here, I am talking about the word there or it followed by is or are. These are technically called expletives, or false subjects. Expletives are not grammatically incorrect. They are just boring and wasteful. Two of the most important words in any sentence are the subject and the verb. By starting with an expletive, you waste these two prime locations on content-free words. Sometimes even passive voice is preferable to starting your sentence with an expletive, if only to get the important nouns and verbs into the subject and verb positions. Sometimes the presence of an expletive at the front of the sentence can indicate that you have not included enough content in the sentence and have merely stated that something exists. Check out these upgrades to a sentence in which the expletive (ahem) has been deleted.
 

Instead of: There are three buttons at the bottom of the dialog box. [things existing]

Try: Three buttons are at the bottom of the dialog box.  [important noun as subject]

Or: The dialog box has three buttons. [a different important noun as subject]

Or better: The dialog box offers three choices. [upgrade verb to an action, upgrade "buttons" to state what they mean to the reader]

Or even better: Click one of the three buttons at the bottom of the dialog box. [action verb using direct address to talk directly to the reader]

Or in the order a reader will need the information: At the bottom of the dialog box, click one of the three buttons.

Or giving more detailed content: At the bottom of the dialog box, click Delete, Rename, or Ignore.

It is not grammatically incorrect to start a sentence with an expletive (case in point, this sentence), but when you read over your own writing, consider whether the expletive could be upgraded to a more informative noun-verb combo, allowing you to pack more content into fewer words.


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Join Jennie online December 18, 2009 where she'll be teaching Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts. This is the last writing class for 2009. It's not too late to register!


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About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
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Adobe Captivate: Looking to Combine SWFs Into One Menu? Think Aggregator!

by Kevin Siegel

In an ideal world, your Captivate projects would be kept to a respectable number of slides (fewer than 150). Why? Large projects will take longer to produce, longer to publish, take longer for users to download and, most importantly, take longer to complete. (I suggest creating lessons that a learner can finish in five minutes, which typically translates to around 80-100 interactive slides.)

Of course, there may be occasions where you want to take several small projects and bring them together into one project-without actually importing slides or objects from one project into another.

If you publish your projects as SWFs, you can combine multiple SWF files into one lesson using the Aggregator. Once added to an Aggregator project, you can publish the combined files as a SWF, EXE file, PDF or HTML. The published Aggregator file will include a TOC using the names of the separate SWF files.

To ensure uniformity of TOC settings across lessons, you can set any SWF in the TOC as the master. The TOC settings of the master are applied to all the other SWFs in the Aggregator.

To create an Aggregator Project:

  1. Publish two or more Captivate projects as SWFs.
  2. Choose File > New > Aggregator Project.
  3. The Create New Project dialog box appears. If necessary, select Action Script 2.0 from the Aggregator Project area.

    Choose your Action Script

    If you intend to use your Captivate lessons within other applications such as Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR applications or Flex, the Action Script version you select is important. AIR and Flex only support ActionScript 3.0; Flash supports ActionScript versions 2.0 and 3.0. In addition, users must have Flash Player 9 or later installed on their computers to view Captivate SWFs created using ActionScript 3.0.

  4. Click OK.
  5. Click the Add Module button at the bottom of the Aggregator window and open the SWFs you published in the first step above.

    Add Module button

  6. The SWF appears in the Module Title area of the Aggregator.

    SWF appears in the Module Title area of the Aggregator

  7. Click the Save tool and save the Aggregator project.
  8. Publish the project by clicking the Publish tool at the top of the Aggregator window.

    Publish the project

  9. When finished publishing, View the output.

    Thanks to the Aggregator, your published SWFs are now played through the common TOC. If you open the folder containing your published assets, you will find a SWF created by the Aggregator along with the SWFs you added to the TOC as modules. Be sure to keep all of these files together when you upload the files to your Web server.

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Looking to create killer eLearning lessons with Adobe Captivate? Join one of IconLogic's Captivate classes, or contact usfor custom group or onsite training rates. Click here for more information about our 2-day Captivate Essentials class. Looking for more Advanced Captivate 4 training? We have you covered. Click herefor more information.

Worried about your class canceling? You'll be happy to hear that we never, ever cancel our classes (even if there's just one student registered).

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Writing & Grammar Workshop: Can I start a sentence with And, Yet, or But?

by Jennie Ruby


The coordinating conjunctions (and, yet, but, for, so, or, nor) are supposed to join things. But can they join sentences? That question has been contended for decades. Bryan Garner, however, in the Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style, says that the belief that a conjunction cannot start a sentence is a "rank superstition." And The Gregg Reference Manual says nothing about any rule against using conjunctions to start sentences, but merely warns against overusing this technique.

So starting a sentence with a conjunction is not a problem. In fact, you can even start a paragraph with one.

The only remaining question is whether to use a comma after the conjunction. The answer is no. But sometimes the conjunction may be followed by a truly parenthetical element surrounded by commas, coincidentally making a comma necessary after the conjunction. If you are putting a comma after the conjunction, make sure the phrase or clause after the comma is truly parenthetical. Check the comma used in these sentences:

  1. The shoes are comfortable despite the hole in the heel and the scuffed toes. But when it rains, my socks get wet. ("when it rains" cannot be surrounded by commas, because it is essential to the meaning of the sentence: the socks get wet only when it rains.)

  2. The shoes are comfortable and you may still love them. But, as your mom says, they should be replaced. ("As your mom says" is a nonessential independent comment. If you removed it from the sentence, the meaning would not change. The shoes should still be replaced whether your mom says so or not. The two commas indicate that it is nonessential.)


In sentence 2, the comma after the conjunction but is there because of the parenthetical clause. If that clause were not there or were not parenthetical, there would be no comma.

Summary: You can start a sentence with a conjunction, and you should not put a comma after the conjunction. If there is a parenthetical phrase or clause after the conjunction, there might coincidentally be a comma there, but that comma is not due to the conjunction.


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Join Jennie online December 18, 2009 where she'll be teaching Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts. This is the last class for 2009. It's not too late to register!


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About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
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Acrobat 9: Where Am I (Exactly)?

by David R. Mankin 

 

Here's a neat little trick that can help you describe a position on a PDF page to a colleague, even if they are not in the same room (or hemisphere). If you are working with a PDF page that has several similar regions on it, describing the proper object can be tricky. For example: "Look at the widget on the left side of the page, near the middle, but a little lower" just doesn't cut it.

What if there was a way to describe an exact position on a page? If you haven't discovered it yet, Acrobat DOES sport rulers, but they are hidden by default. To see them, press [Ctrl] [R] ([Command] [R] on a Mac). With the rulers visible, you can determine your cursor's page position by noting the lines that appear on the rulers as you move your mouse around the page–but that's a visual thing and the lines won't give you the EXACT coordinates of a specific spot on your page.

To determine your cursor's exact position, you only need to turn on a feature called Cursor Coordinates. Choose View > Cursor Coordinates. A small black information box appears in the lower left of your view panel. It shows your current cursor location, in your preferred document measurement system.

X & Y Coordinates

Want to change your measurement units to points, picas, millimeters, inches? Choose to Edit > Preferences (Acrobat > Preferences on Mac), select Units & Guides, and dial in your preferred choice.

The small black box with the coordinates can be dragged around the page as you see fit. If it disappears (and mine has a few times), change your page view from scrolling to single page view, as it apparently likes this view, and wants to hide in scrolling view.

And that's this week's Acrobat 9 tip… coming to you 38 inches from my kitchen sliding glass door, and 129 inches from my stove.

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Learn what PDF technology is all about, and how to use Acrobat 9 Professional to create, edit and enhance your PDF files. Click here for more information and class dates.

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About the author: David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. And if that wasn't enough, of course David is an Adobe-certified expert in Adobe Acrobat.
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Adobe Captivate: Warning Will Robinson, Avoid Flash Player 10.1! But If You Didn’t…

by Kevin Siegel

Adobe recently unveiled Flash Player 10.1. According to Adobe, Flash Player 10.1 "realizes the promise of a consistent, cross-platform runtime across desktop and mobile devices." Nice!

Many people, excited to play with the pre-release of Flash Player 10.1, went right to Adobe Labs, downloaded and then installed the software–on their production machines. Of course, if you were among those people who installed Flash Player 10.1, you are now noticing that your beloved Captivate is no longer working. In fact, here are a few of the posts I saw on the Adobe Captivate forum (does any of the following sound like you???):

"I just put together a new laptop, and installed all the normal programs/drivers (Flash Player, Adobe Reader, etc). I installed Flash Player 10.1 and received the confirmation "Congratulations you now have the latest…" I installed Adobe Captivate 4, the Trial Version. This is not my first attempt at installing/un-installing/re-installing both Captivate 4 and Flash Player 10 on this computer. I'm on my fourth attempt at reinstalling both programs. I am running Vista Ultimate x86. This computer meets all system requirements by Adobe Captivate 4. Is this a problem with Captivate, Flash Player, or (doubtful) my computer?"

Here's another:

"I uninstalled Flash player 10 on my laptop and installed Flash Player 10.1. Now Adobe Captivate doesn't start! I received a message that the Flash Player for IE is not installed and I'm redirected to Adobe's web site to install Flash Player 10."

I don't blame anyone for getting excited about installing and playing with beta software. However, I always recommend that you install this kind of software on a computer that isn't being used for production–you just never know what kind of collateral damage beta software can cause.

If you are like the unfortunate developers above, or know someone who installed Flash Player 10.1, it might be a good idea to know how to both remove Flash Player 10.1 and go back to an earlier version of the player (one that will work with Captivate). Here is an article that will walk you through the process of removing Flash Player 10.1 from your computer. And here is a Web site offering links to older versions of the Flash Player.

Let that be a warning to all you "betaiacs" out there! Beta software is cool, but there is always the chance the beta software can tear up your system!

P.S. Did I date myself with the Will Robinson reference? For you young-ones, the "Warning Will Robinson" is from the old (Did I say old??? I mean not so new!) television show Lost In Space. Never seen it? Don't say I never give you anything.

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Looking to create killer eLearning lessons with Adobe Captivate? Join one of IconLogic's Captivate classes, or contact us for custom group or onsite training rates. Click here for more information about our 2-day Captivate Essentials class. Looking for more Advanced Captivate 4 training? We have you covered. Click here for more information.

Worried about your class canceling? You'll be happy to hear that we never, ever cancel our classes (even if there's just one student registered).

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Adobe FrameMaker: Even Smarter Running Heads

by Barbara Binder 

We talked last week about creating smart running heads (using variables for "live" running heads that pull data off the page). These are great for your readers because they can tell at a glance what chapter and/or section they are in.

But what if you need to pull different paragraph formats into the running heads in different documents (for example, you want your contents title in your table of contents, your chapter titles in the main body of the book, and the index title in the index)? You could set up different master pages in each document, but then if you need to make a global change to, let's say the margins, when you import your Page Layout formats, you'll wipe out the customization. I have a much better way for you:

  1. Choose View > Master Pages.
  2. Click in a background frame to set up a header or footer.
  3. Choose Format > Headers & Footers > Insert Other.
  4. Scroll down to the Running H/F variables and select Running H/F 1 (assuming you aren't using it elsewhere. If you are and don't want to mess it up, just pick the next available Running H/F variable–you have a total of 12, and I'm pretty sure you aren't using all of them.)
  5. Examine the default definition: <$paratext[Title]>.

    In English, this says: "go get the paragraph text of the paragraph format called Title and put it in the running head."

  6. Click the Edit button on the Variables pod (button number 3):

    Edit button on the Variables pod

  7. Edit the variable definition to call out each of the formats you'd like to see in your running head:

    <$paratext[ContentsTitle,ChapterTitle,IndexTitle]>

    In English, the variable now says: "If you can find a ContentsTitle, go get it and put it in the running head, but if you can't find it, see if you can find ChapterTitle and put that in the running head. If you can't find either, see if you can find IndexTitle and put that in the running head."

Wow! Now you can have one variable that works for the front matter, the body of the book, and the back matter. That's a smart variable!

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If you are new to FrameMaker and want to get up to speed quickly, join IconLogic's instructor-led, online Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker 9 class on December 2-3. Too elementary for your skill level? How about the Advanced FrameMaker 9 class on December 9-10? Hope to "see" you there (or at one of our future classes).

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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.