TCS5 – Page 7 – The Logical Blog

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.

January 22, 2014

Adobe RoboHelp 11: Sharing Resources via Dropbox

by Kevin Siegel

Adobe released Adobe RoboHelp 11 last week. Over the next few weeks, I'll be covering some of hottest new features. This week: sharing resources via the Cloud (specifically, with Dropbox).

Sharing resources isn't a new concept in RoboHelp. In fact, the Resource Manager pod has been around for the past few versions of RoboHelp. What's new in RoboHelp 11 is the ability to specify a Dropbox as a folder on the Resource Manager.

To begin, visited Dropbox.com and created an account. I also created a folder in Dropbox and set it up as a share object (both tasks, creating and sharing the folder, were simple and took mere seconds).

Once my Dropbox account had been set up, I started RoboHelp 11 and chose View > Pods > Resource Manager. From the top of the Resource Manager pod, I clicked the Add Shared Location tool.

In the Add Shared Location dialog box, I clicked theLocation type drop-down menu and selected Dropbox. (Each time I've performed this step over the past few weeks, RoboHelp has consistently loaded my Dropbox folder and Path for me. Alternatively, you can click the Browse button and manually locate your Dropbox folder.)

The next step was to add content to my shared Dropbox folder on the RoboHelp Resource Manager. My shared Dropbox folder is called SharedRoboHelpTopics. When I dragged a topic (Alcohol_Policy) to the shared folder, I was delighted to see that in addition to the topic, the Cascading Style Sheet being used by the topic (policies.css) was also added to the shared folder.

One of my team members (Biff Bifferson), who is located in another state, was working on a RoboHelp project and needed to use some of my content. While we don't share a network connection, we both have Dropbox accounts. I accessed my Dropbox account and sent Biff an invite to my SharedRoboHelpTopics folder.

Biff checked his email and added the SharedRoboHelpTopics folder to his Dropbox. Biff then used RoboHelp's Resource Manager pod to add his Dropbox as a Shared Location.

Since his Dropbox included my shared folder, Biff's Resource Manager immediately displayed my shared resources.

To add my shared content to his RoboHelp project, Biff right-clicked the Alcohol_Policy topic on the Resource Manager pod and chose Add to Project.

Like magic, my content was now being used in two projects in two different locations. What do you think? Cool?

But then… then… I edited the topic on my computer. (I know, crazy right?)

My Resource Manager alerted me that my shared assets weren't synchronized (via the red icon shown in the image below). When content isn't synchronized, it's likely that team members aren't using the same content.

Because I wanted to ensure that both Biff and I were working with the same assets, I right-clicked the topic on my Resources Manager and selected Sync.

Green check marks indicated that all was well between the content in my RoboHelp project and the assets in my Dropbox. But I was curious to learn if Biff actually got the updated content in his project. And if so, what was his experience? Was it painful?

It turns out that Biff's experience was almost, well, routine. He told me that when he opened his project with RoboHelp 11 later that day, he was greeted with the Linked Resource Notification dialog box shown below. All he had to do was click the Update button and his content was automatically synchronized with mine. In a word… that's awesome!

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January 17, 2014

Adobe Presenter: Managing Voiceover Scripts

by Jennie Ruby

Adobe Presenter has a pretty nifty way to help you display your voiceover script while recording audio. Instead of having to manage a printout while simultaneously recording your voice and clicking through slides, you can view your script in a moveable pop-up box that functions much like a heads-up GPS display. The script is overlaid on the slide in slideshow view, so you can see the slide, click through any builds, and advance the slide, all while never losing sight of the script you are reading.

All is well and good until you find an error in your script or want to make a change in the voiceover. You could just record something different from what your script says. But that would create a mismatch between the printed script–which Presenter picks up automatically from the PowerPoint Notes pane–and your audio voiceover. Since those PowerPoint notes may also form part of a handout or other materials, it is a best practice to make sure they match.

You could, of course, stop recording, close the script pop-up, close the recording tool, return to PowerPoint, update the notes, start the recording process again, and so on, but that would be quite time-consuming.

Instead, you can just edit the script right in the pop-up box, and have Presenter update the PowerPoint notes for you. Here's how:

First, ensure you have displayed the Script pop-up from the Record dialog box by clicking the Show Script button.

Adobe Presenter: Show Script

Then edit the script as needed.

Before:

Adobe Presenter: Script Before Edting

After:

Adobe Presenter: Script After Edting

Next, at the lower right, click the Update button.

That's it. The script has been updated both here and in the PowerPoint Notes pane. Don't forget to save the presentation after recording to make sure the updates are retained.