Accommodating Active Learners in Software Documentation Decisions  

Recent research focusing on a minimalist approach to computer software documentation has explored ways to design computer software tutorials and workbooks for users with an active learning style. The principles of minimalism and active learning styles, however, are less frequently applied to traditional reference manuals. This paper reviews several elements of minimalism and suggests ways to apply strategies for active learners to traditional reference manuals.

Smart, Karl L. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Instructional Design>Software

Acrobat 7 zum komfortablen Erzeugen von Druck und Schnittmarken einsetzen

Wer kennt das Problem nicht? Aus einem riesigen Dokument wurde ein PDF erzeugt. Nun muss es auch noch für den Druck aufbereitet werden. Dafür fehlen aber die Druck- und Schnittmarken. Acrobat 7 hilft hier aus der Patsche.

TECOM (2003). (German) Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Acrobat Features Turbocharge the Online Review Process

One of the more tedious and error-prone processes in technical writing is that of collaborative document review. Even when documents are shared electronically, keeping track of comments, suggestions, and changes contributed by multiple team members can be exasperating. Too often errors due to collaborative review lead to delays, missed deadlines, misunderstandings and an inaccurate final document.

Gravel, Charlie. Carolina Communique (2003). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

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

Baking up a Batch of PDF Files  

Customize how Acrobat works for you by building and using batch sequences. The beauty of a batch sequence is that you can modify or run it as you like.

Baker, Donna L. Adobe (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Bridging the Gap Between Design and Editorial

With both Adobe InDesign® CS and Adobe InCopy® CS in your publishing workflow, writers and editors can compose stories in InCopy at the same time designers are laying out the pages using InDesign—without overwriting each other’s work.

Adobe (2003). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Cleaning up PDF Documents in Acrobat

If you are posting your PDF document to a web site, you'll generally want to upload a clean copy that will streamline the viewing experience for your site visitors. This tip outlines a quick way to remove unnecessary annotations, widgets, JavaScript, links, bookmarks and attachments, along with optimizing your documents for fast web viewing.

Shea, Dan. PlanetPDF (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Creating a Template (Part I): The Basics

The natural tendency of most users of word processing applications is to create a document and use it as a model for future documents. That is, you format a letter the way you want all (or most) of your letters to look, save it, and then, when you want to write a letter, open this document and save it under another name as the starting point for your letter. In WordPerfect, until recently, this was the only way to create a template. Word uses a different approach.

Barnhill, Suzanne. Word MVP Site, The (2005). Articles>Document Design>Software>Microsoft Word

Cropping Pages to Highlight Areas in Acrobat

When you receive a PDF that contains, say, an image that is surrounded by text, how do you highlight the image? One way is to export the graphic to an imaging application such as Photoshop, but that involves additional applications and the associated loading times. A great 'quick and dirty' fix here is to use the 'Crop' tool to hide the content that surrounds the image, leaving you with PDF which displays only an image, just the way you wanted it. This tip explains how.

Shea, Dan. PlanetPDF (2006). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Custom Stamps in Acrobat

While Acrobat comes pre-loaded with a selection of stamps, including 'Approved', 'Declined' and 'Accepted', users can also create custom stamps of such things as company logos for use on their PDF documents. Complex or graphically rich stamps can be created or prepared in imaging applications before being added to Acrobat's selection. This tip explains how to create a custom stamp using an existing file.

Shea, Dan. PlanetPDF (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Custom Toolbar

We recently converted our documents from Word to FrameMaker. Most of the people in my department had been using Word for years and had grown accustomed to applying character formatting using key commands or buttons on the toolbar. I was afraid that they would use the same methods in FrameMaker simply out of habit, rather than using character tags.

Henkel, Rick. Docspages. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Designing Text to Flow Around Objects

Wrapping text around objects—from basic shapes or frames to images with clipping paths—can give any publication a unique look and feel. In this tutorial, you’ll learn several ways to work with text wrap in Adobe InDesign® to achieve the look you want.

Adobe. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Desktop Publishing Shootout

Whatever the subject of lists I follow, two basic questions usually come up about every three months. Usually the person posting the question has to make a decision between: Pagemaker or Quark (and often FrameMaker), or Macintosh or PC.

Haugen, Diane. Document Design (2001). Articles>Document Design>Software

A Distiller Primer

Can somebody explain what the process of distilling is -- in simple terms?

Publish. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Document Hack (A Technical Writer's Journal): From Acrobat to FrameMaker

FrameMaker is the industry standard for writing book-length documents. It is a powerful program capable of creating books of well over a thousand pages. The learning curve for the program is significant. FrameMaker is a much different animal than Microsoft Word and other word processors.

Hewitt, John. Writer's Resource Center (2004). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Document Hack (A Technical Writer's Journal): The Acrobat and the Illustrator

Using Acrobat, you can make minor edits to a PDF file, but Acrobat documents are very sensitive. Typing a single character can throw several lines off, destroy tables and cause all sort of other troubles. Alternately, it can be relatively uneventful and painless. You will not know until you type in that character.

Hewitt, John. Writer's Resource Center (2004). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Efficiency: It's Not Just for Production Monkeys

With a few free tools from software companies and other users, you can carve out more time for what you really love -- creativity.

Ashcroft, Sean. Creative Pro (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

FrameMaker Batch Processing and Automation Using MIF

Have you ever wanted to check a large set of FrameMaker files to make sure all the borders, text- symbols, and rulers are turned off? What about hyperlinks? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to automatically validate all the hypertext links within a large set of FrameMaker files? Did you ever wish there was a way to automatically convert a set of data into FrameMaker tables? You can do all these things, and more, using the Maker Interchange Format (MIF). This article presents some of the main features of MIF and gives an overview of some of the ways you can make use of MIF. Additional articles will delve deeper into using Perl to process MIF, providing details on specific applications.

Larsen, Seraphim. Silicon Valley Connection (2002). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

FrameMaker Resources

FrameMaker seems to be Adobe's best-kept secret. A tremendously powerful desktop-publishing program, FrameMaker has been ritually ignored by reviewers who instead concentrate on the big three DTP apps: QuarkXPress, InDesign, and PageMaker. Adobe positioned FrameMaker as a niche 'word-processing' product appropriate only for long-document production.

EDITsphere (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

FrameMaker vs. FrameMaker+SGML

Everything that is in FrameMaker is in FrameMaker+SGML. FrameMaker+SGML has capabilities that FrameMaker does not have.

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

FrameMaker: Easy to Learn

I'd like to vote in favor of dispelling the MYTH that FrameMaker is difficult to learn.

Muller, Rita. InFrame. Articles>Software>Document Design>Adobe FrameMaker

FrameMaker: Structured or Unstructured?

At the 2004 WritersUA and STC Conferences, structured FrameMaker and XML were among the more popular session topics. There is obviously significant interest in the user assistance community about authoring XML documents with structured FrameMaker. This is not surprising, as many organizations are struggling with the problems of creating and delivering increasing amounts of user assistance in multiple formats, and managing their content in a way that maximizes their capabilities to reuse content across multiple publications.

Houser, Alan R. WritersUA (2004). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

FrameScript Tutorials: An Introduction to Writing Scripts

FrameScript is a lot like FrameMaker; it has a fairly steep learning curve, but once you learn it, you’ll find it a real workhorse. The best way to start is to read the FrameScript Scriptwriter’s Guide. And the Quick Reference will provide you shortcuts to learning the FrameScript syntax. This tutorial will introduce some foundational concepts of writing scripts that will help you get started.

Carmen Publishing. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

FrameScript Tutorials: Cross-References

There are two types of cross-references in FrameMaker: paragraph cross-references and spot cross-references. (There is a third type, element cross-references, available only in FrameMaker+SGML. This tutorial will not discuss element cross-references) Both paragraph and spot cross-references are similar, in that you have to insert an Xref object that points to a Cross-Ref Marker. The Xref object has an XRefSrcText property that must exactly match the marker text of the Cross-Ref Marker. Let’s start with spot cross-references, since they are a little simpler to work with.

Carmen Publishing. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker