Author-it Tidy Up

Firstly a quick thank you to everyone who has commented on the previous post. What a fantastic bunch you are, and as I mentioned in the comments, I’ll be using your first names and locations in an infographic for an upcoming presentation. Fame will be yours! (Note: fame not guaranteed)

In other news I’m deep in the trenches of 2000+ Author-it Topics, stepping through each one to clean up formatting, correct hyperlinks, set the correct template and so on. I’m working my way through all our old content, imported using the MIF Import. It’s not the most stimulating work but needs must.

On the way I’m fixing bits and bobs in both Author-it and the Word template that we’ll use to generate the PDFs of our documentation from. If nothing else the context switch is keeping me sane!

One annoyance is the fact that I’ve had to add a “Reset Numbering” paragraph style as without it you’ll find your numbered lists (that we use for procedures) roll on and on through your document. I’d have thought the Procedure Heading style would’ve been setup to handle this out of the box but, alas, not. So far it’s the weakest area for me, and I’d certainly love to see some more example templates, either provided by the company, or on a community submission basis.

I’ve also spent a fair bit of time dipping in and out of the Author-it Yahoo Group which is a fantastically helpful resource. Well worth joining if you are an Author-it user.

Right, best get back to it. Hoping to get that number below 2000 by the end of this week!

Comments

  1. Oh. Sad to see another one go down the bug-strewn AuthorIt path. Nice idea for software, incredibly incompetently implemented.

  2. Arturo – sad to hear that, I’ve not had many major problems with it to be honest. Yes it has bugs, but I’ve yet to use an application that didn’t.

  3. It sounds like you’ve stumbled across a fairly common MS Word problem with list numbering.

    We found that this exact behaviour came up so often that we documented 2 versions of the behaviour and how to correct them in our online Knowledge Centre.

    Troubleshooting List Numbering in Word – http://www.author-it.com/kc/index.mv?9056

    Sounds like your situation is scenario B in the article. If that doesn’t help with this please feel free to log a support case with out online helpdesk (cases can be logged via the My Author-it portal – http://my.author-it.com), we’ll be only too happy to assist.

    Cheers,

    Julie Goodwin
    Technical Support Team Leader
    Author-it Software Corporation

    Web: http://www.authorit.com

    One Source. One Solution.

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