Welcome to IconLogic's Blog. Learn about Articulate® Storyline®, Articulate Rise®, TechSmith® Camtasia®, Microsoft® PowerPoint®, eLearning, Adobe® Captivate®, Technical Communication, Adobe FrameMaker®, Adobe RoboHelp®, and more.
We are proud to announce that our newest book, "Adobe Captivate 8: Beyond The Essentials" is now shipping.
This book is a companion to our top-selling "Adobe Captivate 8: The Essentials" book and delves into such Captivate features as responsive layouts, creating project templates, accessible eLearning, and working with a Learning Management System.
Technological change is not new, but the pace of change in some fields is breathtaking. Battery technology is one example, and photo-voltaics is another. And of course, technology associated with reading is experiencing a dramatic rate of change.
How do people cope with rapid change in their fields? Neil Armstrong learned to fly in 1945… a time when the sound barrier was considered to be an impenetrable barrier. By the time of Armstrong's first posting as a US Navy pilot in 1950, the sound barrier had been broken, and the first jet fighter squadrons had been formed. In 1957, Armstrong flew a rocket-powered aircraft for the first time. By 1960 he had flown at close to 4,000 mph (six times the speed of sound) to heights of 120,000 feet. Armstrong managed this transition as a pilot by continually learning. Over 10 years, he progressed from subsonic jets, to transonic jets, to supersonic jets, to rocket aircraft. Each step was relatively small, but overall it was a giant leap (to quote a phrase Armstrong later used when he stepped from Apollo 11).
How does Neil Armstrong's journey into space relate to technical communication? Consider that it only took 10 years for us to move from typewriters (1980) to laser printers (1990), from text-only Web browsers (1993) to websites with embedded movies (2003).
The Apollo 11 story can provide another lesson for technical communicators. As the name implies, Armstrong's Apollo 11 mission was the eleventh in a program of 20 missions. The program objective was landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. Each mission was part of a broad strategy… part of a far-sighted plan.
Big projects only reach their goals if they come with a comprehensive plan. Like many projects, there can be hurdles and disasters. The Apollo 1 spacecraft exploded on the launch pad, killing the three astronauts. The next three missions were unmanned flights to test systems. Each mission validated a different system. The unmanned Apollo 5 orbited the earth. Apollo 6 tested the Saturn V propulsion. Apollo 7 was a manned orbit. Apollo 8 circumnavigated the moon. Apollo 9 tested the lunar module, and 10 was a dress rehearsal. In documentation, this might be called iterative development. Unit testing is another IT term that might apply.
For large documentation or training projects, an Apollo approach is a good model. Here are some small steps to success:
and… most important…
Looking back, you'll see how those small steps became a giant leap.
What is more effective, a print document or an online document? It wasn't all that long ago that print documents would definitely have been voted more effective, especially considering the poor quality of computer monitors and slow internet speeds. (Remember trying to pull up a document on a modem?)
Given the speed of today's internet and mobile device support, print documents are likely going the way of the dinosaur. Online documents have several advantages to their print counterparts. For instance, eBooks reflow to fit the user's device (think about how popular eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle have become in just the past few years). Online documents are searchable, typically contain hyperlinks for easy navigation, often include videos and/or animations, and some even contain interactivity in the form of eLearning simulations created in Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline.
There are millions upon millions of print documents around the business world that would gain new life if they were online. The major challenge in moving from unstructured to structured documentation, or page layout to reflowing text, or paper to online, is the shift in mindset required. Simply put, many old design paradigms used for print documents don't fit in new media design.
There are many reasons for converting paper documents to online documents such as cost, efficiency of updating, document control, accessibility, and discoverability. Surprisingly, for the custodians of paper documents charged with managing the conversion, there is often a reluctance to embrace the migration from print to online. For those custodians, the paper version remains the primary document, and the online version is secondary.
Even if the paper custodians agree to take the paper documents online, much time and effort is spent trying to imitate the paper design in the online design. For example, the paper documents are scanned and converted to PDF. While aPDF will work in an online world, a PDF is really just a digital replica of the paper document. While a PDF may open on a tablet or smartphone, it won't re-flow to fit the user's screen like an eBook.
If you're trying to convince the "powers that be" to make the move from print documentation to an online document, consider the following:
The text used in the print document may require a specific font and font size. When online content is displayed for the user, the user's device may have limited font capabilities. Even if the device is capable of displaying the font, if the user doesn't have that specific font installed on the device, the font displayed will be the browser's default. For instance, you have used Futura as the font for your content. If the user accesses your content via a web browser and does not have the Futura font on their computer, the browser will likely display Times New Roman instead.
Paragraphs may need to be indented by a specific amount. While setting up a specific indentation is easy in a print layout tool such as Adobe InDesign, the user's device may have limits to how indentations are displayed.
Headings may have to be sequentially numbered. While many print layout tools allow you to easily number paragraphs, those automatic numbers may not display properly online.
You may be required to include footnotes. While footnotes are easy to add to print documents, they're a problem online. Since there really isn't an end to a page online, where would the footnotes go?
Page numbers may no longer be valid. If your print document includes cross references (such as, "For more information, see page 11"), you could end up with a mess. If your print content is displayed as an eBook, the content that was on page 11 could now be located on page 22. If the text on the page tells the user to reference page 11, but the text is actually on page 22, you can imagine the trouble you'll have.
The graphics could be huge. In the print document, high resolution photos were used. They look great on paper. However, they're so big (in megabytes, not width or height), they'll take forever to download over the Internet if you leave them as-is. To use the images, you'll need to allow time to save the images as online versions (in jpeg or png format). When you do, the images will likely lose quality. Will they still look good?
If you do decide to migrate your print documents to the online world, off-the-shelf authoring tools such as Adobe RoboHelp and MadCap Flare will help make the process easy. Both tools allow you to quickly convert printed documentation (especially Word documents) into online documents. Both tools support cascading style sheets that handle fonts, colors, paragraph numbering, and indentation. And both tools allow you to create master pages complete with headers and footers. Nevertheless, there are limits to what any authoring tool can do when it comes to recreating the look and feel of a print document, so look into the limitations of each tool prior to moving forward.
What's your take on print documents as compared to online documents? Is print doomed? Which medium do you think is more effective, print or online? What tool do you use to convert from print to online? Can you share instances/examples where you think print documents are more effective than online documents? Feel free to post your opinion as comments below.
Take the Text Caption shown below for example. The arrow in the upper left of the caption is known as a callout.
You can control a few attributes of the callout (you can use the Properties Inspector to select from a list of pre-determined positions and you can elect not to show the callout). But if you want to fully adjust the callout (perhaps move it a bit to the left or right, or make the callout a bit longer), you're out of luck.
Many Captivate developers, tired of the limitations of standard Text Captions, have forsaken Text Captions altogether for Smart Shapes. In the image below, I'm using a Rectangle Smart Shape. The shape looks much like a Standard Text Caption. I can control its appearance via Object Styles. However, check out how I am able to drag the shape's callout by dragging the yellow square. You can't do that with a Text Caption.
Because Text Captions are really bitmap images, I'm not able to fully control how the captions look unless I edit the bitmaps using an image editing program. With Smart Shapes, you can control just about every aspect of the way the shape looks by combining options found on the Properties Inspector with Object Styles.
While there is much to love about Smart Shapes, a perceived downside to Smart Shapes is that you can't use them to automatically get captions when recording a Software Simulation. You'll be happy to learn that you can, in fact, use Smart Shapes instead of Text Captions during the recording process.
Display Captivate's Preferences (Windows users, choose Edit > Preferences; Mac users, choose Adobe Captivate > Preferences). Choose a recording mode and, from the Captions area, select Use Smart Shapes instead of Captions.
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Unless you've been deliberately avoiding them, it's a good bet you've come across images similar to the one below.
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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe FrameMaker? Check out our live, online, instructor-led FrameMaker classes.
Last week I told you about the great enhancements you'll see in Adobe Captivate 8 when it comes to image buttons. This week, I'm going to show you a few more improvements that I think you'll love.
In previous articles you've learned about RoboHelp's User Defined Variables (how to create them, group them, and use them in topic titles).
As a brief review, variables can contain information that occurs frequently in your project, such as a product name, company name, or copyright notice. After creating the variable, you can insert it into any RoboHelp topic or onto a template by simply dragging and dropping. Now here's the cool part. Assume your company name now appears throughout your project and now you want to change it. Without the variable, you would have to search your entire project and update the company name. Thanks to variables, all you will need to do is update the definition of the CompanyName variable, and you will change the displayed company name project-wide in just a few seconds.
One issue you'll come across when inserting variables within a topic is that, by default, the variable text looks like regular topic text. In the picture below, I challenge you to locate the variable.
Did you find the variable text? I'm betting that the answer is no. So what's the big deal? This can be particularly frustrating if you need to replace regular text with a variable. For example, you can highlight regular text in a topic and convert it to a variable by dragging the variable on top of the text. That's an awesome feature. Before I begin however, I need to be able to tell, at a glance, if the text I'm looking to replace is already a variable. As it stands, I have no idea since I cannot tell the difference between a variable and regular text.
Luckily, RoboHelp has a handy feature that allows you to distinguish between variables and regular text in topics. To enable this feature, simply choose View > Show > Fields.
Voila. All variables in topics are now shown as green text. Best of all, variables only show up green in your project… when you generate a layout, the green color will not be visible to your users.
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Creating eLearning for mobile devices was high on the wish list a few years ago when Adobe asked users for the top features they'd like to see added to Adobe Captivate. It wasn't long before Adobe responded by adding HTML5 as a publishing option. HTML5 allowed developers to create interactive content that can be used by mobile learners who have a device that does not support Flash.
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Desktop user: 1024 pixels wide.
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Tablet user: 768 pixels wide.
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Mobile user: 360 pixels
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Once you're done laying out each canvas, all you need to do is publish and post the lesson to a web server or LMS just like always. When the lesson is accessed by your learner, the lesson will automatically detect the learner's screen size and the correct canvas will be displayed. Awesome!
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Adobe last week announced Adobe Captivate 8, a significant upgrade to one of the top eLearning development tools in the world.
Over the past few years I've repeatedly heard a couple of complaints about Captivate. First, it was perceived as difficult to use. There were so many panels, pods, and toolbars it didn't take too much effort for the Captivate workspace to get cluttered. Sure it was possible to create a custom workspace, but that didn't seem to matter. The fact that a panel could be accidentally moved from one part of the screen to another was causing all kinds of drama.
Another major complaint was Captivate's lack of support for mobile users. You could publish a Captivate lesson as HTML5, but the way a lesson looked when viewed on different screen sizes wasn't something a developer could control.
Captivate users will be happy to learn that both major pain points have been addressed with Captivate 8. Shown below is the Welcome screen you will see when you first start Captivate 8. There are two tabs, Recent and New. After selecting New, you'll find the usual suspects including Software Simulation, Video Demo, and From PowerPoint. You'll also see a brand new… and very awesome… option for creating Responsive Projects (something I'll cover in a future post).
If you're a veteran Captivate user, you'll notice right away that in addition to the Welcome screen getting a nice redesign, there is no longer a check box in the lower left to permanently hide the Welcome screen. This may not seem like a big deal, but I can't tell you how many times I've heard from people using Captivate 7 and older who tell me that the Welcome screen is missing. It turns out that they've accidentally hidden the Welcome screen. And while it's easy to bring it back, I'm delighted to see that since it cannot be hidden that issue is gone.
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When it comes to eLearning, I develop content for many government and education organizations where Section 508 Compliance is required. Section 508, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, requires all Federal agencies to make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.
If you want to make your eLearning courses accessible for everyone, it's a good idea to think about people who are hearing, visually, and dexterity (motor skills) impaired. Additionally, it's important to consider the elderly population and people who speak English as a second language.
Assistive devices provide a way for people with disabilities to communicate and train using technology. People who are visually impaired or blind need devices such as:
People with hearing impairments need visual representation of auditory information such as:
People who have mobility impairments may need:
Although creating accessible eLearning can feel like an additional task, the goal is to enhance your eLearning courses by ensuring that all learners can master the instructional material and meet the learning objectives. When learning is accessible to all types of learners, you are not only complying with regulations, but you are reaching a larger audience, upholding social responsibility, and increasing your effectiveness as an eLearning developer and instructor.
Note: This is the first in a series of articles covering accessible eLearning from Anita. Stay tuned for more! And if you'd like to take a 3-hour deep-dive into the best practices for creating accessible eLearning, check out Anita's live, online course.