Adobe FrameMaker Autonumbering Examples

Autonumbering had changed as new versions of FrameMaker have arrived. What worked in FrameMaker 5 might have broken in 5.5. This is due to changes Adobe made in the restart building blocks (request presentation). While our examples below use the maximum building blocks (meaning a little extra work), the result is numbering schemes that are more flexible for multiple versions of FrameMaker.

Bright Path Solutions (2004). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Adobe Systems Speaks Out on DITA: Internal use of FrameMaker, CMS, and DITA

Asks Puny Sen, Project Lead, Instructional Communications at Adobe Systems to talk about the software giant's foray into the world of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Sen shares details about Adobe's recent DITA documentation project, the pro's and con's of using DITA with FrameMaker, as well as lessons learned of importance to anyone interested in adopting the DITA standard.

Ethier, Kay and Scott Abel. Bright Path Solutions (2005). Articles>Documentation>XML>DITA

Adobe's Robert McDaniels Responds (Again) to Nielsen Criticisms of PDF

Many of the 'PDF Usability Crimes' Nielsen cites have nothing to do with Acrobat or PDF but are the result of poor design choices. Most of same arguments about poor navigation, large file sizes, and excessive text blocks can be used to describe poorly designed HTML as well. There are some very valid reasons for using PDF's online as opposed to HTML.

McDaniels, Robert. PlanetPDF (2003). Articles>Usability>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Adolescent Diary Weblogs and the Unseen Audience    

This paper first situates adolescent diary weblogs and their implied audiences and then applies a typology of audiences for personal narrative performance to a sample of diary weblog posts to ascertain if the typology fits the implied audiences present in the weblog text.

Scheidt, Lois Ann. Indiana University (2005). Articles>Writing>Web Design>Blogging

Advance Organizers in Advisory Reports: Selective Reading, Recall, and Perception    

According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory report, read by 159 experienced professional readers in a between-subjects design. Their reading time was limited to encourage selective reading. The results show that graphic advance organizers facilitate selective reading, but they do not enhance recall. Verbal advance organizers introducing a problem enhance recall, and graphic advance organizers moderate the effects on both selective reading and recall.

Lagerwerf, Luuk, Louise Cornelis, Johannes de Geus and Phidias Jansen. Written Communication (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration

Advanced Blogger  

Blogger's primary advantage is its simplicity--if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you'll find it's just as easy to customize it.

Doctorow, Cory, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott. O'Reilly and Associates (1998). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

"Advanced Composition" And Occasion-Sensitivity

As writing teacher but also freelance writer and editor, I rejoice to see current advanced composition textbooks emphasize sensitivity to occasion. For real-world writing profoundly requires audience-awareness. Out there, students will not be writing yet another typical theme for the teacher, concerned mainly with correctness. Nor will they be writing expressively, concerned mainly with self and authenticity. They must be writing for the occasion, to achieve specific purpose with specific readers, and hence must be concerned with effectiveness above all. But what about actual current classroom practice on this point?

Beck, James P. JAC (1981). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

Advanced Usability Topics  

An increasing number of STC members now have usability programs as part of their job responsibilities, although they’re not always full-time usability specialists. Many STC members have been performing usability activities for several years.

Rosenbaum, Stephanie L. and Lori K. Anschuetz. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Usability

Advanced XML Validation

XSLT stylesheets are designed to transform XML documents. Coupled with Java extensions, stylesheets can also be a powerful complement to XML Schema when grammar-based validation cannot cover all the constraints required. In this article, Peter Heneback presents the case for validating documents using XSLT with Java extensions and provides practical guidance and code samples.

Heneback, Peter. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Advancing Advanced Search

Advanced search is the ugly child of interface design--always included, but never loved. Websites have come to depend on their search engines as the volume of content has increased. Yet advanced search functionality has not significantly developed in years. Poor matches and overwhelming search results remain a problem for users. Perhaps the standard search pattern deserves a new look. A progressive disclosure approach can enable users to use precision advanced search techniques to refine their searches and pinpoint the desired results.

Turbek, Stephen. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search

Advantage of a Rainy Summer

This article deals, despite the title above, with aspects on handling and checking of technical documentation. I consider these aspects as part of the functionality of documentation besides more conventional functionality such as factual correctness, layout, combination of figures and text.

Rullgård, Åke. TC-FORUM (2000). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design

The Advantages of Using Web Technology for Intranets

Thanks to web technologies, the intranet allows us to access and share information easier than ever before.

Lightheart, David. David Lightheart Web Communications (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Adventures in Collaboration: The Story of an STC Faculty Internship  

Rentz relates the lessons she learned as an academic who contributed to a writing project for a private company.

Rentz, Kathryn. Intercom (2003). Articles>Collaboration>Industry and Academy

Adventures with OpenOffice and XML

In addition to being open source, saving as XML makes OpenOffice truly open. Aside from being open source, XML's self-documenting nature allows us to dive into the document format without having to dive into C++. And more significantly, XML allows us to use simple, free tools to manipulate the documents themselves. In this article we will examine the structure of the format.

Sergeant, Matt. XML.com (2001). Articles>Software>Word Processing>OpenOffice

Advertisers are Missing the Internet Connection, OPA Report Reveals

According to a June 2006 study conducted on behalf of the Online Publishers Association (OPA) by the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, advertising dollars aren't keeping up with skyrocketing consumer web demand.

Dye, Jessica. EContent (2006). Articles>Content Management>Marketing

Advice for New Managers: Part 1

The central mistake new managers make is egoism. On the surface, the change is all about you: you’ve been promoted, you have a new job title, you have a new office. Perhaps you’ve been waiting for this change for some time, while watching peers or friends get promotions, and now finally you feel you’ve received the respect you’ve earned.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Advice for Single-Sourcing

I have seen the future and it works. We have just finished our first single-sourcing project using mif2go to convert FrameMaker source files to HTML Help *.chm files. These files are also the source of our printed user guide AND a hyperlinked PDF of the user guide placed on the distribution CD. There was considerable once-off pain setting up conversion templates (including CSS files) and conversion options but our next project will be much faster. The converted files DO NOT require ANY hand tweaking -- we just hand over to the release people to put the *.chm file on the installer CD. Our testing and support people are rapt, and consider the new help far better than the old help. An outsider would have no inkling that the help was produced in this way.

Finger, Hedley. InFrame (2002). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Advocating Plain Language: Thom Haller Discusses The Need For Clarity

Plain language is clear, concise, and straightforward presentation of information. It is professional content structured to eliminate ambiguity and confusion in technical, government, and legal documents. Plain language allows readers to fully comprehend complex regulations, practices and instructions by requiring the language of bureaucracy to reflect the language of everyday speech.

Haller, Thom. Rockley Bulletin (2007). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric>Minimalism

AECMA 1000D - Goal and Reality

The contribution deals with the transposition of projects on the basis of the AECMA-1000D-specification. The author explains problems which exist outside aeronautics with the application of this specification.

Just, Stefan. TC-FORUM (2001). Articles>Documentation>Standards

AECMA Simplified English  

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (formerly AECMA Simplified English) is a specification for writing aircraft documentation. The principles can be applied to all industry sectors. ASD-STE100 provides a set of writing rules and a dictionary of words and their meanings. It has a limited number of words; a limited number of clearly defined meanings for each word; a limited number of parts of speech for each word; a set of rules for writing text. This article outlines the standard, and shows how it helps to prevent ambiguity in text.

Unwalla, Mike. ISTC (2004). Articles>Writing>Minimalism>Controlled Vocabulary

Aero, El Escritorio Que Viene

El futuro de Windows pasa por Longhorn, el nuevo sistema operativo que Microsoft prepara para 2005 y que supondrá, según ellos, la 'inmersión vital' de los usuarios en la nueva tecnología. Revisamos lo que se sabe de ello hasta el momento.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Articles>User Interface>Operating Systems>Microsoft Windows

Aesthetics Engage Language    

Although the medium of film, by virtue of its photographic process, is image-dominated, some of its finest efforts have been in re-presenting word-centric tales. The text—appealing to the intellect—is refashioned/reinvented into a medium appealing to the senses of sight and hearing, through the personal vision of an auteur/director who adapts material from the language of text to the language of film. Certainly technical considerations come into play, but the auteur’s choices are essentially aesthetic. In rendering words into images, he or she responds to the audiovisual aesthetic of film.

Ades, Sally. Lore (2003). Articles>Rhetoric>Aesthetics

The Affective Domain and the Writing Process: Working Definitions  

Since the time of classical Greece, we have been accustomed to viewing humans as both thinking and feeling individuals. The dichotomy of cognition and affect is so ingrained in Western thought that it seems a natural one; the two elements have seldom, however, been deemed equally important in the scientific community. During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, psychology gave primacy to affect; humans were thought to be at the mercy of various drives and passions. As behaviorism became more domiúnant in the field, affect was discounted; indeed, there were those who wished to exclude affect from scientific study altogether. More recently, with the ascendancy of cognitive psychology, humans have been viewed as problem-solvers whose thinking processes operate rather like a computer. Often in such a view, affect is seen as “a regrettable flaw in an otherwise perfect cognitive machine” (Scherer 293). But most researchers who study human behavior and human nature agree that the views of both extremes—emphasizing only affect or only cognition—are undesirable.

McLeod, Susan H. JAC (1991). Articles>Rhetoric>Theory

Affinity Diagrams

Affinity diagramming is a categorization method where users sort various concepts into several categories. This method is used by a team to organize a large amount of data according to the natural relationships between the items.

IAwiki. Articles>Information Design>Charts and Graphs>Card Sorting