Month: July 2009

bookmark_borderThe impossible bike ride

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My legs are pumping, sweat drips from my brow, trickling down my nose, my hands are slipping on the grips and through half shut eyes I watch the distance slowly rise.

More! Faster! COME ON!! I silently urge myself, blocking out the slow burn of acid in my muscles, pushing myself on, adrenalin surging round my body whilst I gasp for air.

The timer counts down, seconds to go, I know I won’t make it but I have to try, all the way, 100% until there is no time left, push push push, the pedals spin and my legs scream at me to stop.

The timer hits zero, I sit up in the saddle and gulp down air. Huge mouthfuls, a drowning man saved. My legs slowly calm as I slow down.

I look down at the display, hoping for the distance I want, the distance that was set, the target that spurred me on.

The LCD glows. 10.4km.

I silently curse.

I slowly cool down, stretch my legs and head home. Why can’t I do it? Why am I so far away from it? I’ve done it once before, mere weeks ago, what is wrong with me??

And then it hits me.

Two weeks ago I sat back after spending 40 minutes on the bike. I ‘travelled’ 12.1km. Excellent, I thought. A good target. Since then I’ve only managed around 10km, quite a drop, and it’s taken me until now to realise why.

I’m only cycling for 30 minutes.

My brain is trying to kill me.

bookmark_borderThe Picnic

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The Picnic

It was a glorious day yesterday, wisps of cloud slowly meandered across the sky as the gentle breeze softly buffeted the long grass. Somewhere in Balloch Park a group of people were sitting on the grass, picking at various foodstuffs, drinking various concoctions, and chatting and laughing with nary a care in the world.

We were there as a wee celebration for my sister-in-law gaining her degree. She was quite tipsy by the time we left and apparently went on to the pub afterwards too!

It was a nice, relaxing day and I even found time to have a wee nap in the sun, dreaming of future picnics in the sun. All rather lovely.

bookmark_borderAuthor-it Hints, Tips, & Useful Info

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The following are not in any particular order. Some are tips gleaned from experience, some are links to the knowledge being shared by others, all have helped us get us from a standing start to a full content conversion and production delivery in under 4 months. We started with ~2450 topics of imported content, and managed to keep pace with the development team as well as cleanup and backfill the imported content. Quite a feat!

Working with Author-it

As we were converting a LOT of content from FrameMaker to Author-it, there was a LOT of cleanup required. Being able to customise the styles toolbar, adding in the most common used paragraph styles for example, was a huge bonus. We ended up creating one under the Supervisor login, and then each team member copied that to their installation.

Apparently Prompt for unsaved changes is turned off by default. We found this out the hard way, so click the big Author-it A and check in the options to turn this on.

JavaHelp Tips

JavaHelp uses the HTML templates, so if you provide customised HTML templates it will use those.

This next one might be specific to the way our development kit works.

To get context senstive help working you need to add the agreed string to the Context String field on the Help tab of the Topic Properties dialog.

We used this on some topics that will only appear in the help system, allowing us to create ‘landing pages’ which can then direct users to the most pertinent topics for the area of the product they were using when they launched the online help.

MiniTOC

These are, by default, used in Chapter templates. To get better control of the layout of these (our issues were mainly with vertical white space, or lack thereof) we decided to not have any content in a Chapter topic. That way it is only used to hold/generate the MiniTOC and the next topic holds the first block of text for the chapter.

Terminology

To make it easier to reuse topics anywhere, we switched our terminology slightly. There is no such thing as a chapter anymore, unless you have Word/PDF specific topics. We use ‘section’ instead.

Word template

The source of many a frustration, but that’s not really the fault of Author-it.

One thing I’d suggest you do first would be to figure out what macros you need and get them into the template first. Remember to configure the Publishing engine to use them as well.

We are using the following macros, all of which are available from the Author-it Yahoo Group:

  • HyperlinkedTOC – creates links from the table of contents text, rather than just the page numbers
  • RemoveCH – Removes the CH from the SuperHeading text
  • ResizePictures – makes sure images fit the column width
  • ResizeTables – make sure tables fit the column width
  • SaveAsPDF – creates a PDF of the Word document

See how to Add an Author-it AfterPublish macro to the Word template for a simple set of instructions.

Problems with numbering? Julie Goodwin, Technical Support Team Leader at Author-it, popped up in a comment last month and pointed me at this solution.

Useful links

First place to head for information is, unsurprisingly, the Author-it Knowledge Center, it’s a replication of the entire documentation set plus some very useful Tips and Tricks and Workarounds.

After that, your next step should be the Author-it Yahoo Group. It’s active and full of hugely helpful and knowledgeable people and without their help I don’t think we’d have managed to hit our project deadline.

One member of the Yahoo Group, Rhonda Bracey, has published several excellent tips on her blog. Well worth a look.

A recent addition to Author-it, one we are currently looking at, are Variants. Hamish Blunck has an excellent overview of how Variants work, and there are more goodies to be found on his website.

And last, but not least, there is an official Author-it Blog which publishes product news, tips and tricks and other random stuff on a regular basis.

bookmark_borderSmarty Pants

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I wanted to mark today, specifically to mention here so I don’t forget it. My memory is lousy and no matter what the future may hold, I want to mark down today as a day I was inspired.

My sister-in-law graduated today and now holds a degree in Dietetics. I’m not quite sure what letters she can now use after her name, I’m guessing BSc, but I do know she got the equivalent of a 2.1 (but they don’t state that as she isn’t doing her Honours).

She’s not the type to make a big fuss over things, and chatting with her after the graduation ceremony she was quite calm and accepting of the fact. And why shouldn’t she be? She’s done all the studying, the essays, the juggling of placements around her work hours, so I guess she’s at the point where it’s a bit of a given that she now has a degree.

Her kids are all very proud of her, three of them were there today but unfortunately her oldest son couldn’t because he’s just (this morning at 2am) become a Dad for the first time, and I’m certain her Dad is thrilled and the only shame is that her Mum couldn’t see this day.

So, well done Claire. I don’t think there are all that many mothers who aren’t long past THAT ‘big’ birthday, have brought up four wonderful children, have kept down a job and who have just received a degree (which included a year of pre-degree coursework at college).

I have to admit I had a little pang of jealousy as, having not found my passion until later in life, I didn’t finish my degree (Electronic Engineering for what it’s worth… not much, trust me!). It might spark me into pursuing that MBA I’ve been eyeing up for the past couple of years.

Regardless, I’m chuffed to bits for her, she’s worked her ass off these past few years and I’m sure the true sense of her achievement will start to sink in soon.

And I’m really not trying to bask in her glory by suggesting that proof-reading her essays was what really made the difference, honest I’m not…

bookmark_borderIt's RIGHT THERE!

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I almost shrieked like a girly girl. There it was, floating a metre in front of me, within touching distance, if I just stretched out my hand I could probably feel it under my fingertips. I wondered if anyone would notice and, glancing around, I saw the same look of wonderment that I could also feel plastered across my face.

Yup, there was no doubting it. Floating in the space between my seat and the cinema screen, the Nickelodeon logo was slowly revolving and looking very 3D. Ohh sorry, very RealD.

It was quite awesome. I wish I could find some better words but, like, seriously, it was AWESOME!!

All very impressive and that was before the movie started. The movie, Ice Age 3D, was about Mammoths and Dinosaurs, some cute baby dinosaurs, a cute baby Mammoth, had no real plot but a few giggles and on that front probably met all its requirements, although to be honest, it was a largely secondary affair to the technological wonder of the evening.

I can remember when Jaws 3D came out and how underwhelming the experience was, there seemed to be a disconnect between the 3D elements and the movie which broke the suspension of disbelief, never a good thing.

But last night, once I’d gotten past the schoolboy amazement of seeing things float out of the cinema screen, it struck me (not literally, it’s 3D but it’s not THAT good) that it felt natural and connected to the movie I was watching. Ohh of course there were a few gratuitous “lets put some grass at the front to show off the 3D-ness” moments but pretty soon it stopped surprising me that some of the characters seemed to be sitting in the front row of the cinema.

I can also happily report that George Lucas will soon be remastering the entire Star Wars franchise in RealD. Well, if not, he probably should given that one of the chase scenes (featuring flying dinosaur type things) was a straight rip off of the Pod Race which was so FREAKIN AMAZINGLY AWESOME that I almost wet my pants as the winged dinosaurs flew past me, into the screen and beyond at a zillion blurry miles an hour. AWESOME!

So, all in all colour me impressed (which I believe is just a bright purple).

It’s not all roses though. Some of the trailers were in 3D whilst the animated movies looked OK, those feature live actors looked like the reality was being forced, like there was a deliberate effort being made to introduce depth where none was needed.

Safe to say though that I was hugely impressed and the novelty of watching items from the movie float around and leap past me easily got me through the movie. The fear is that it will be just that, a novelty.

bookmark_borderGuest Posting

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A few weeks ago Scott, from the always relevant DMN Communications blog asked me if I’d be interested in writing a guest post.

I immediately said yes then, after a short pause, I set the expectation that I wouldn’t be able to write one for a few weeks as I was coming to the end of a project.

So, last week I finished off my guest post and I’m now waiting, somewhat nervously, to see how it will be received. The post goes live on Wednesday, so not long left to find out.

It’s quite liberating, writing a blog post for another website (not done that for years), and it sparked a few ideas for this place as well. You’ll start to see some of those soon.

Thanks to Scott for the opportunity, and keep your eyes peeled to the DMN Communications blog on Wednesday.