February 2014 – Page 2 – The Logical Blog

February 10, 2014

Localization: Training & Development in Chile

by Jen Weaver

If you're like me, winter's cold weather and icy winds are becoming a bit tiresome. So, this week let's head down south and enjoy the warm weather of a Chilean summer as we explore some common cultural facts about Chileans and their expectations when it comes to training and development.

Test your knowledge of Chilean culture with the Fun-Fact questions below:

Who is Condorito?
True or False? Chile is almost as long as California.
True or False? To fit the entire country on a TV screen, weather maps have to divide the country into three parts.

Quick Tips for Training & Development in Chile¹:

Chile's official language is Spanish, although English is spoken by many well-educated professionals. It's highly recommended to translate and localize your training materials to make the greatest impact on Chilean learners.
Natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, abound in this country. Some visitors also experience altitude sickness when traveling in certain cities. Keep this in mind if you're conducting a class onsite.
In negotiations, most Chileans place importance on emotions rather than facts, and truth is often considered subjective.
As in many Latin American cultures, family is of great significance to Chileans. It's important not to bring dishonor on one's loved ones, and familial ties may mean the difference between professional success and failure.
Relationships and friendships are essential for business, so it's important to build rapport with your students when initiating a new class.
North Americans and Europeans are expected to be punctual for business meetings, but Chilean participants may arrive late.
The business culture is more formal than in many other Latin American countries. Do not address people by their first name unless invited to do so. Many younger Chileans will promptly extend this invitation upon meeting you. Business dress code is closer to European formal than American business attire.
Citizens in many countries, including Chile, write the date with the day first, then the month, then the year. For example, February 4, 2014, is written 4.2.14 or 4/2/14.
Chilean summer holidays are in January and February, so it's best to avoid scheduling classes in those months, if at all possible.

Fun-Fact Answers:

Condorito (Little Condor in Spanish) is a famous cartoon condor created by Chilean René Ríos Boettiger. Condorito is the Spanish-speaker equivalent of Mickey Mouse.
True
True

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Developing international training and development materials? Contact Jen at Carmazzi Global Solutions.

February 9, 2014

Writing & Grammar: Periods with Abbreviations

by Jennie Ruby

Should I use periods in the abbreviation U.S.? What about USA? What about Mr. and Ms.? What about m, s, ft, in? Wait, what were those? They were meter(s), second(s), feet, and inches.

The issue of periods with abbreviations is largely a style matter–a matter of convention. Knowing what the conventions are will make you a faster writer and editor. You won't have to stop and wonder and Google these and accidentally be drawn into those endlessly intriguing "This five-year-old walked out, winked at the audience, and you will never believe what happened next!" videos. (Don't bother to look. I just made that one up.)

Instead, you can punctuate or not punctuate, create your own style guide if necessary, and get on with your writing.

So here are some general guidelines that will get you through punctuating abbreviations and acronyms.

Guideline 1: Make an arbitrary decision, right now, about US/U.S. and UN/U.N. It is a coin toss.

Guideline 2: Are you in a scientific/technical field? Or is your writing for a more general audience? Pick one, and then go to the matching section below.

General Audience

Guideline 3: Abbreviate units of measure only when preceded by a number. And even then, only if they occur a lot in your material. If you abbreviate units of measure, use lowercase letters and periods.

We asked how many feet the water rose during the flood.

They installed a 10-in. border around the flowerbed, which was a 3 ft. by 12 ft. area on the south lawn.

Guideline 4: If it is only one capital letter, use a period.

Guideline 5: If it is all capital letters, no periods. If there are any lowercase letters in the abbreviation, use periods.

Mr.

Ms.

Ph.D.

Guideline 6: Make an arbitrary decision right now:

am and pm

a.m. and p.m.

AM and PM

Scientific/technical audience

Guideline 3: Abbreviate units of measure even when not preceded by a number. Don't use periods, except with in. for inch, because it matches the word in.

Guidelines 4 and 5: Almost never use periods for any abbreviation. See your style guide for exceptions.

Guideline 6: Why aren't you using the 24-hr system?

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Challenge

Standardize the abbreviations in this paragraph. Use either the general audience or the scientific audience rules. Caution: there may be other stylistic issues besides the punctuation of the abbreviations.

The flowerbed should be 12 feet wide and 5 ft deep. To determine how much sunlight the area receives, start at 5:30 AM and observe the area at 1-hour intervals until 8:00 p.m. I prefer to use the guidelines published by Ms Good Gardener in her blog, but you may want to consult others if your garden is outside of the US. Also be aware that some plants are sensitive to U.v. radiation. You can find additional information on the amount of sunlight your lawn receives by typing your Z.I.P. code into a search tool. If your garden is big enough, you may need an ATV to get from one side to the other with all your tools. FYI, yours truly once had an RV and an S.U.V., but now drives a Prius.

When you're ready, feel free to post your answers below.

February 7, 2014

Adobe Presenter 9: Replacing the Default Playbar Logo with Your Own Logo

by Jennie Ruby

When you publish an Adobe Presenter presentation, a small Adobe logo appears at the beginning of the playbar.

It is quite small, and many consumers of your presentation might not even notice it. But then again, maybe they will. You can replace the Adobe logo with your own by doing a little bit of setup work.

First, create a SWF file of the logo you would like to use on the playbar in place of the Adobe logo. The size of the replacement logo must be 47 pixels wide x 27 pixels high. Give the new SWF the following name: logo.swf.

Save the new logo.swf file in the Adobe Templates folder (replace the existing logo.swf file). A typical path to that folder might be c:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Presenter 9.0\Templates

With your presentation open in PowerPoint, use the Publish tool on the Adobe Presenter tab to publish the presentation.

Adobe Presenter: Publish tool

Adobe Presenter: Publish dialog box

And just like that, your logo will replace the Adobe logo on the published playbar.

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Looking for training on Adobe Presenter? IconLogic offers alive, online introduction to Adobe Presenter class. You can attend class from anywhere in the world… even from the comfort of your home.

February 5, 2014

Adobe Captivate: Swapping Speech Agents

by Kevin Siegel

During every Captivate beginner class, time is spent on the second day teaching everyone how to use Captivate's Text-to-Speech feature to convert slide notes into speech.

Recently, one of my students asked an excellent question: "I'd love it if there was a pain-free way to quickly change the agent from Kate, to Paul to Chloe, and then maybe back to Kate. As it stands, I need to select each slide note in the Speech Management dialog box, one at a time and then change the agent. It would help I, at the very least, I can select all of a slide's notes at once and change the agent. Is this possible?"

The answer is yes, you can select multiple slide notes and change agents on the fly (not multiple slides, but multiple notes). The solution, while easy, isn't obvious. Here's how:

First, go through your project and convert the slide notes to speech. If you're not sure how, review this article.

After you've committed to an agent, changing your mind is just as easy as selecting the original agent. Choose Audio > Speech Management to open the Speech Management dialog box.

In the image below, notice that different agents have been used between the two slides.

Next, select all of the notes for the slide. While this sounds simple, you'll need to carefully click in the space just above each note to successfully select the note.

From the Speech Agent drop-down menu, select an agent. In the images below, both slide notes are selected for Slide 2 and Chloe is being selected from the Speech Agent drop-down menu. (Note: While you can select multiple slide notes, you can only select the notes for one slide at a time; you'll need to repeat this process for each slide.)

The final step is to simply click the Generate Audio button at the bottom of the dialog box and you're all set.

If you'd like to see a demonstration of swapping one Speech Agent with another, check out the video I created on the IconLogic YouTube channel.

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Looking for training on Adobe Captivate? We offer multiple live, online Adobe Captivate classes each month including Introduction to Adobe Captivate and Advanced Adobe Captivate. Need the training in-person? We can also bring the same great training onsite to your facility. Interested? Contact us for details.

February 4, 2014

Already Own Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite? Adobe Offering Awesome Savings on TCS5 Annual Subscription

All existing customers of Adobe Technical Communication Suite, Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe RoboHelp are eligible to take advantage of a limited promotional offer from Adobe. You can purchase subscription licenses of Adobe Technical Communication Suite 5 at 40% off for an entire year.

While you still have plenty of time to order TCS5 and enjoy the 40% discount, Adobe has indicated that the offer ends sometime in July.

More information.

February 4, 2014

Adobe RoboHelp 11: Responsive HTML5

by Kevin Siegel

When I teach my two-day Adobe RoboHelp class, students quickly learn that they need to generate a Layout (via the Single Source Layouts pod) before they can deliver usable Help content to their users.

During the class, attendees learn the strengths and weaknesses of each type of layout. For instance, they learn that WebHelp is excellent if users will be accessing the Help content over the internet and they're using computers running Windows or the Mac OS.

WebHelp, while offering excellent cross-platform and cross-browser support, does not support users who are using mobile devices such as the iPad or iPhone.

When Adobe released RoboHelp 10, one of the biggest innovations was Multiscreen HTML5. Since content generated using the Multiscreen HTML5 layout displays across mobile devices, Help authors can support all sorts of display sizes. The problem with Multiscreen HTML5 is that prior to generating the content, RoboHelp developers need to take the size of the user's display into account. In addition, customizing the look and feel of the Multiscreen HTML5 layouts isn't easy since you don't have access to an area like the WebHelp Skin Editor (which makes customizing a WebHelp skin a snap).

Adobe RoboHelp 11, which was just released a few weeks ago, added a new, very exciting layout to the Single Source Layouts pod: Responsive HTML5. With this layout, you don't have to take the variety of screen sizes users might use into account. If the user is viewing your content on a desktop, they will automatically see an appropriate arrangement of the screen components; if they view your content on an iPhone or Android phone, they will see the components resized and rearranged in a layout to best suit the smaller display size.

Here's how Responsive HTML5 works. First, visit the Single Source Layouts pod and double-click the Responsive HTML5 layout. The layout appears by default within new RoboHelp projects. In legacy projects that have been upgraded to RoboHelp 11, click the Create Layout tool (shown below). Select Responsive HTML5 from the Output type drop-down menu and click the OK button.

Similar to WebHelp, you can specify an initial look and feel for your Responsive HTML5 layout by clicking the Gallery button.

There are two designs in the Gallery area and you can download more via the link at the right of the dialog box. In addition, as you'll see in a moment, you can easily customize the layout.

After selecting a layout from the Gallery, you will be presented with a series of screens that allow you to easily customize many components that make up the original design. What I really like about this area is that the Adobe engineers have labelled everything so you know what each area controls.

Generate the layout and it will open in your default web browser like WebHelp, FlashHelp, or Multiscreen HTML5. In the image below, I'm viewing the Responsive HTML5 output on a desktop computer and the display is pretty large. With a larger workspace, notice that there is a navigation area at the left of the browser window.

In the image below, I've resized my browser window to a size more appropriate for a tablet (such as the iPad, Kindle Fire or Microsoft Surface). Notice that the navigation icons have bounced to the right, responding automatically to the size of my display.

And in the image below, I've resized my Help window again. This time the navigation icons have dropped to the bottom of my display.

As I continued to resize the browser to simulate various screen displays, the icons got smaller and were positioned appropriately for the size of the display.

Adobe RoboHelp 11: Responsive HTML5 on a small display.

Of all the layouts I've used in RoboHelp over the years, I firmly believe that Responsive HTML5 is the absolute top of the mark. While WebHelp is currently the industry standard when it comes to generating Single Source Layouts, I expect Responsive HTML5 to vault into the top spot very quickly.

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Looking for training on Adobe RoboHelp? IconLogic offers live, online Adobe RoboHelp classes each month for both RoboHelp 10 and the new RoboHelp 11. We can also bring the same great training onsite to your facility. Interested? Contact us for details.