The Logical Blog by IconLogic

Preparing FrameMaker Anchored Frames for Import into RoboHelp

When FrameMaker content containing anchored Frames is imported to RoboHelp, the anchored frame is converted to XHTML and the quality of the resulting images might not meet with your approval.

This article describes some of the best practices and workflows that will help improve the quality of the images.

Adobe FrameMaker: Troubleshooting Unavailable Fonts

by Barbara Binder 

I never like opening up a FrameMaker document and getting the dreaded unavailable fonts dialog box:



Sadly, with multiple authors who contribute documents to me from around the world, it's just a fact of life that I see the dialog box frequently. Each time that I do, my goal is to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.

When a document has unavailable fonts, the missing fonts will be listed in the FrameMaker Console. Look at your taskbar to locate the Console and you can see the list of troublemakers:



I typically begin by noting the unavailable fonts, and then search for them by choosing Edit > Find/Change. I then pick Character Format from the Find drop-down menu, and press [Shift] [F8] to set the window to As Is. I change the Family to the missing font, and repeat for the Change drop-down list, only I substitute the Family I'd like to use. With the Find and Change buttons, I remove all usages of unavailable fonts, repeating as necessary to address all fonts listed in the Console.

To test the results, I save the file, close it, and then reopen it. Normally, I'm good to go. Sometimes, however, the document will still show unavailable fonts. I check the Console again, make a note of the names, and then try it again, because maybe I missed one or two on the first try. Or not.

What frustrates me is when a documents states it has unavailable fonts, but then comes up with the Not Found message when I search for them:



Now what? It's actually pretty simple. Just choose File > Save and save the file as a MIF document. Close the file, open the MIF, and then save it over the FM file. That will take care of unavailable fonts that are not actually in the document.

Why do we need that extra step? I don't know. I guess I'll head over to the Adobe Feature Request & Bug Form and remind Adobe that this needs fixing. If you see bugs or think of some great feature for FrameMaker 10, don't just think about it, please use this form to let Adobe know.

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Need some more help with FrameMaker? We've got an online Adobe FrameMaker 9 Introduction class coming up December 2-3, 2009. Sign up today. Looking for advanced FrameMaker training? Click here to our upcoming Adobe FrameMaker 9 Advanced dates. Looking for other online classes? Click here.

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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 was recently recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide for 2007.

Adobe RoboHelp 8: Start Page, Project Title and Default Topic... Let's Get Them Straight Once and For All!

by Kevin Siegel

As I've continued to teach my online RoboHelp class to students who attend from all over the world, one recurring issue has been confusion over the following three RoboHelp features: the start page, the project title and the default topic. The three files/names are totally different, having nothing to do with each other, but are commonly confused.

By the time you are finished reading this text, I'm hoping that the confusion is a thing of the past.

The Project Title: The Project Title is determined when you create the project (you type the name into the "Enter the title of this project" field).



You won't come into contact with the Project Title again until you Generate the project. At that point, the Project Title appears in the browser's title bar (and the tab title if the browser supports tabbed browsing).



You can change the Project Title via the General tab on the Project Settings dialog box (Edit > Project Settings). A Project Title can, and should, contain spaces.




The Start Page: The Start Page is a file that is created automatically by RoboHelp when you generate the project. The start page is the frameset that displays the toolbars at the top of the help screen, the navigation panel at the left and the default topic at the right. The Start Page is, in no way, the Default Topic (which is discussed next). Instead, the Start Page is simply the page that gets your whole system to display once it has been called by an application.

The name of the Start Page is typically the same as your project name (which you determine when you first create the project). However, once the project has been created, you can easily change the name of the Start page via the Properties of your layout (on the Single Source Layouts pod) by typing a new name in the Select Output Folder and Start Page field (name.htm). The name of the Start Page can never contain spaces.



The Default Topic: Once the Start Page has done its job and the Help System opens, the Default Topic open and appears at the right side of the Help System. By default, the Default Topic will always be the first topic you created when you first created the project. However, you can easily change the Default topic via the Properties of your layout (on the Single Source Layouts pod).



And there you have it... the Project Title, Start Page and the Default Topic all work together in a generated project. While the Default Topic and Start Page can be changed in the same basic place (the Properties of a layout), I am hoping that any confusion is now a thing of the past.

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Looking for Adobe RoboHelp training? Need it fast? IconLogic has a live, two-day online RoboHelp 8 class coming up November 19-20, 2009.

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). Click here to learn more about our other online classes.

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Follow Kevin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/iconlogic.

Adobe Captivate 4: Gotta Scroll?

by Kevin Siegel

When the time comes to record an eLearning video using Adobe Captivate that requires scrolling, there are two basic techniques you can use: automatic and manual. What are the two techniques and which one is best? Great question... read on...

If you enable Full Motion Recording (via Edit > Preferences), Captivate will automatically capture your scrolls and drags (i.e.., using the scroll bar to scroll up or down) by simply dragging your mouse. Your saved Captivate video will contain a Full Motion Recording (FMR) for each drag and your published video will demonstrate the scroll.

There are a few problems you should be aware of should you go the FMR route. First, your published video will include the FMRs and will likely result in a much larger SWF (larger than SWFs that don't contain FMRs).

The resulting FMR will likely contain poor quality video (depending on the level of the video settings you specified before you recorded the video).

The FMR you recorded cannot easily be edited (beyond some simple tweaks).

Lastly, your LMS just might reject the FMR video. (I've received more than one disturbing email from Captivate developers who have told me the FMRs play everywhere, except from within their LMS.)

Given the troubles that FMRs can cause, I would urge you to go the manual route.

During the recording process, press [print screen] on your keyboard just prior to scrolling to manually capture the screen. Next, position your pointer on the scroll bar and press [print screen] again. Click once to scroll up or down. Press [print screen]. Repeat the process as necessary to complete the scroll. Do not drag your mouse... instead, point and press [print screen], click and press [print screen].

Once you've pulled the screen captures and saved the video, you have two choices when it come to producing the slides that show the scroll. First, on the slide just before the scroll, add a text caption that says something like "Watch as we scroll for you." Next, speed up those slides that actually show the scroll so that they stick around for only a half second or so. During playback, customers will see the message "Watch as we scroll for you" and the scroll will occur. Cool!

Alternatively, you could make the scrolling interactive by typing "Click the scroll bar to scroll" on the slide just before the scroll. Then, hide the mouse and add click boxes on those slides that show the scrolling. Cooler!

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Looking to create killer eLearning lessons with Adobe Captivate? Join one of IconLogic's classes, or contact usfor customer group or onsite training. 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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Follow Kevin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/iconlogic.

Writing & Grammar Workshop: Can I start a sentence with "hopefully?"

by Jennie Ruby

Can you start a sentence with the word "hopefully?" Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Some people used to say you could not, but grammar books now say you can. The controversy used to be about whether hopefully is an "independent comment" like finally, actually, regrettably, fortunately, and many other words. These words act as asides to the reader to indicate the writer's opinion or attitude about the entire sentence. If you need a more technical term, they are "sentential modifiers," adverbs that modify the entire sentence.

If you are curious about some of the players in the controversy, they are The Careful Writer by Theodore Bernstein, The Chicago Manual of Style, and The Gregg Reference Manual. My opinion, stated above, agrees solidly with The Gregg Reference Manual. Chicago says that the usage I cite above is "here to stay," but snips, "But many careful writers deplore the new meaning" [emphasis added--could this be a nod to readers of Bernstein?] Bernstein has not been updated, fyi, since 1965.

Yet another voice in the squabble is The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style, by Bryan Garner. The advice here? All the controversy has ruined this word. Never use it at all, because no matter what you do, someone will think it is wrong.

Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster.com utterly dismisses Bernstein and all critics and solidly supports the use of hopefully as an independent comment.

So there you have it. My vote is to use it until people get over its history. After all, most people have long forgotten the "impact" wars of the late 1980s. But on the other hand, I recently encountered "impact is a noun only" still alive and well in the style guide of a large organization. Ultimately, I guess, each writer must make up their* own mind.
 
*Watch for a future article on the use of their.

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Join Jennie online where she'll be teaching Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts.

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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.

Adobe FrameMaker: Better, Faster= Longer Lunches

by Barbara Binder 

I'm midway through an annual FrameMaker production job. It's a great opportunity for me to get out of the classroom and into the same trenches that you climb into every day.

First of all, let me say that I'm impressed with Frame 9. It is as stable as it used to be years ago (yes, FrameMaker 8, I'm talking to you).  A full week with equations, large tables and lots of figures-and no tears. Woo Hoo!

As I'm working, I'm thinking about things that I do to make my production work go faster. Here are a few of my favorite tips:

• Go to your computer's Control Panel and open the Mouse controls. On the Pointer Options tab, select Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog Box and click OK.
  
  
  
  FrameMaker's dialog boxes pop up all over the place. This one little checkbox will save your wrist the extra movement to reach the OK button.
  
  
• Rapidly pull out all those extra hard returns: Find: \p|\p, Change to: \p and turn Use WildCards on.
  
  
• Use keyboard shortcuts. Tables are one place where I slow down in production. I particularly like these (remember that all Escape key shortcuts are sequential-you can execute them with one finger):
  
  
  • Esc ti (Insert a table)
    
    
  • Esc ta 1 t Enter (Add a header row)
    
    
  • Ecs tl (straddle selected table cells)
    
    
  • Esc tw (shrinkwrap cells to selected cells contents)

My FrameMaker students will all recognize this sentiment, which I drill into them during class: when you can shave seconds here and there from your workflow, those seconds will eventually grow into minutes and hours. And for the longest jobs, the time you save can mean the difference between a free weekend, and one spent in front of the computer, trying to make deadline.

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Need some more help with FrameMaker? We've got an online Adobe FrameMaker 9 Introduction class coming up October 22-23, 2009. Sign up today. Looking for advanced FrameMaker training? Click here to our upcoming Adobe FrameMaker 9 Advanced dates. Looking for other online classes? Click here.

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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 was recently recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide for 2007.

Acrobat 9: Patch It!

by David R. Mankin, the Acrobat Czar

This past Tuesday, Adobe released a giant patch to Acrobat & Reader. The patch addresses <gulp> 29 security vulnerabilities (don't be smug about this if you're a Mac user or even a Linux user--the patch is for all three operating systems). What types of vulnerabilities are exposed? Malicious PDF files opened in Adobe Reader and Acrobat could cause the applications to crash and enable remote attackers to infiltrate your computer and launch information-stealing malware (programs developed specifically for causing harm to your computer). Yikes. Now that you understand why you should install the patch, here's how to do it.

Choose Help > Check for Updates to start the Adobe Updater (which automatically connects with Adobe's server and checks to see if you have the most recent versions of all your installed Adobe applications). If there is a more recent update available, you can mark it for download and installation. Your preferences can be customized to have the Adobe Updater check for new patches and updates automatically either weekly or monthly.



I suggest that you not wait to install the patch--your data is too valuable for someone else to be browsing through and looking for your passwords and personal data.

Once successfully patched, you can then choose Help > About Acrobat 9 Professional (or whatever release you have installed). You should see a message that says "Version 9.2" once the patch is installed.

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Looking for Acrobat training? We run an online Acrobat class once each month. Click here for more information and class dates.

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About the author: In addition to recently being named the nation's Acrobat Czar, 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.

Camtasia Studio 6: An Introduction

I will be teaching a live, full-day, hands-on online workshop for the ASTD on November 3, 2009 that will introduce you to Camtasia Studio 6. (Camtasia is a program that allows you to quickly and easily create high-quality training and sales videos for mobile devices and the Web. Click here for more information.)

Adobe RoboHelp 8: User Defined Variables

by Kevin Siegel

RoboHelp allows you to quickly create and use variables. What are variables and how can they help you? 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.

Let's say you want to have your company name appear throughout the project. You could accomplish the task the old-fashioned way by typing the company name over and over again. Or you can create a variable called CompanyName, whose definition is your actual company name. After creating the variable, it's a simple matter of dragging the CompanyName variable into any topic.

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.

Create a Variable

1. Show the User Defined Variables pod by choosing View > Pods > User Defined Variables.
   
   By default, the User Defined Variables pod is empty. Let's create a variable that will link text to your corporate Web site.
   
   
2. At the top of the User Defined Variables pod, click the Create a new variable button.
   
   
   
   The New Variable dialog box appears.
   
   
3. Type a name into the Variable Name field (no spaces allowed).
   
   
4. Type your company name into the Variable value field.
   
   
   
   
5. Click OK.
   
   Your unformatted variable text appears in a panel to the right of the variable list. You will add a hyperlink to the variable text next.
   
   
   
   
6. Highlight the variable value (your company name).
   
   
7. Right-click the selected text and choose Insert Hyperlink.
   
   The Hyperlink dialog box appears.
   
   
8. Select Web address from the Link to drop-down menu.
   
   
9. Type your corporate Web address into the field to the right of http://
   
   
   
   
10. Click OK.
    
    
11. Save your work.
    

Insert a Variable into a Topic

1. Open a topic.
   
   
2. Drag your variable from the User Defined Variables pod into your topic.
   
   The variable value will appear in the topic. The value will be formatted to match the CSS attached to your topic and contains a hyperlink.
   
   
3. Drag the variable into more topics.
   
   
4. Save your work.
   

Edit a User Defined Variable value

1. At the right of the User Defined Variables pod, double-click the linked text to your company.
   
   The Hyperlink properties appear. If the Web address you typed a while ago was incorrect, you could fix it now.
   
   
2. Click OK.
   
   Anywhere you used the variable (two times or 10,000), the value instantly updated. How cool is that?
   

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Looking for Adobe RoboHelp training? Need it fast? IconLogic has a two-day, live, online RoboHelp 8 class coming up October 22-23, 2009. 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). Click here to learn more about my online classes.

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Follow Kevin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/iconlogic.

There's Nothing Rapid About "Rapid eLearning"

Jon Lloyd currently works for VMG. But back in the day, Jon worked for a company called eHelp. Maybe you've heard of eHelp? Maybe not? eHelp is the company that bought RoboDemo, now Adobe Captivate, to market. A few years back, another now-defunct company--Macromedia--absorbed eHelp. But that's another story.

Getting back to Lloyd, he knows a thing or two about eLearning. Lloyd says that many young developers have got it wrong when it comes to how long it really takes to develop eLearning.

According to Lloyd, "Rapid eLearning has seen a seven or eight year maturation that sometimes amuses me quite a bit. Why? Because many of the young developers have probably never had the experience of working within a large multimedia development team consisting of designers, storyboard teams, Flash developers, and creative artists. They are reduced to storyboarding in PowerPoint or Post-its, developing in Captivate or Articulate, and using iStockPhoto to fill in for their illustrative work."

"I believe that rapid is only relative if you compare development to the 'old days'--which consisted of large teams with fairly specialized talent (not excluding the folks using Director or Authorware!)," Lloyd continued. "Interestingly, when eHelp released their first version of RoboDemo, and even though it was a brand new tool in a new market, there was a high degree of difficulty selling people on the value of going to our training classes. 'Hey, this is easy! I can crank out training in no time!' Not so fast Sparky!"

Click here to read Jon's entire article. Trust me, it's worth the click!