Code for my web site

<html>

<head>

</head>

<div class=”button_bar”>
<button class=”but” onClick=”changeSheets(1);”>Style 1</button>
<button class=”but” onClick=”changeSheets(2);”>Style 2</button>
<button class=”but” onClick=”changeSheets(3);”>Style 3</button>
<button class=”but” onClick=”changeSheets(4);”>Style 4</button>
</div>

<h1>What do technical authors do?</h1>
<div class=”narrow”>
<p><strong>Technical authors</strong> design, create, and, maintains technical documentation. They write about a technical subject which is aimed at particular audience. A technical writer communicates with subject matter experts (SME), testers, and developers, to obtain accurate and up to date information to include in their documentation. </p>

<p>A lot of time is spent on gathering and sorting information, so information is as accessible, concise yet complete, and accurate as possible.</p>
<p>A more accurate description of the role of a technical author would be a technical ‘communicator’ because of the time spent gathering information as opposed to writing. </p>
<p>
<a href=”What skills do they need.htm”>What skills do they need?</a></p>
<p><a href=”Table of contents.htm”>Table of contents</a>
</p>
</div>

</body>

</html>

May 9, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

My table of contents code

This is the code of my table of contents page

<html>

<head>

</head>

<h1>Table of contents</h1>
<div class=”narrow”>
<p><a href=”What do technical authors do.htm”>What do technical authors do?</a></p>
<p><a href=”What skills do they need.htm”>What skills do technical authors need?</a></p>
<p><a href=”What software do they use.htm”>What software do they use?</a></p>
<p><a href=”How much do they earn.htm”>How much do they earn?</a>
<p><a href=”Where do I find a job.htm”>Where do I find a job?</a></p>

</p>
<p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

May 9, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

Reflection and conclusion to my multimedia problem

As I have now come to the end of writing my web site to inform readers about being a technical author, I am now going to reflect on my work.

What did I learn during this project?

These were my intended goals:

1. Learn how to create a web site in Dreamweaver

I achieved this goal and produced my very first web site using Dreamweaver.

2. Learn how to create different style sheets (css) in Dreamweaver

I achieved this goal; I created four style sheets and wrote a function and java script to allow the user of the site to switch between the styles.

3. Learn how to write some functionality that allows users of the site to switch between the different style sheets, without altering the content of the current page. This will probably be a javascript calling a function.

This is as per point 2 really.

4. Learn how to publish my web site on to WordPress.

I did not manage to do this; I had not realised there were some restrictions as to what you can post on Word Press. I intended to use a server at the University but this did not come to fruition. I therefore emailed the web site for assessment. The positive side of this is that it has taught me about the different types of files you can and cannot upload to WordPress.

In summary, I went from being a complete novice user of Dreamweaver to producing a web site with content and hyperlinks and one in which the user could change the style at the touch of a button.

Has the project been successful?

I therefore feel my project has been a success and am happy with the knowledge and experience it has given me.

Any limitations or things I’d do differently

The site is limited in content because it is a prototype; I felt that although the content is important, I really wanted to concentrate the maximum effort on learning about style sheets and writing the javascript and function that allows the style of the site to be changed. So maybe I’d include more content if I was doing this project again. It would be interesting to get some feedback on how useful the site actually is for the intended audience.

I would have also liked to rename the styles as themes and think about some meaningful titles for the styles.

Further things I’m going to investigate in Dreamweaver after this experience.

I’m going to see if I can find out a way to allow the user to keep with the same style once they have changed from the default and clicked an inline link. I will investigate further online and also see if I can find any books about it in the library.

May 7, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

A further problem I need to investigate

Having put links to other pages of my web site in my web site I’ve realised that if you choose a style other than the default, when you click a link to another file it does not carry the changed style to this sheet i.e. it goes back to the default. i think it’s because of this code:

I’ve tried deleting this from each file and running it but it doesn’t work – just switches to the second style sheet as puts all fonts displaying differently.

I need to work out if there’s a way of keeping the style between links to other pages in the web site. Enough for today however I think!

Update Wednesday 7th May:

I have tried and tried to find a way around this problem but I can’t seem to work it out. I think it is above and beyond my brief anyway – I have achieved what I intended to when I defined my multimedia problem; that is to write a web site in which the user can switch styles and I’m happy I got that far!!

May 3, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

Updates to my multimedia problem and solution

Hi,

Today I’ve been making updates to my web site using Dreamweaver. I’ve just done the following:

Created a table of contents so the web site is more navigable and user friendly. This involved creating a new topic and then referencing each topic in the code using the following format: <a href=”Where do I find a job.htm”>Where do I find a job? </a>. I think it makes sense for this to be the first page that the user opens (or make it the default one that opens) so the user can see the structure and parameters of the site. It’ll also (hopefully!) allow them to access the information they want to know quickly and easily.
Linked each page to the next page by using the href format mentioned above. I’ve just tested it out and all the links seem to be working. This too will help the user navigate around the site and I also felt it was needed so the site hung together more coherently.

Ok, now I’m going to add content to each of pages, then I need to think about making the styles more visually appealing and maybe thinking up theme names for each of them. At present they’re just named style 1, style2, style3, and style4 which is kind of dull.

That’s all for now – will post again when I get more done.

May 3, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | 1 Comment

Literature review #5 – Review of the MadPak authoring suite

Review of the MadPak authoring suite

By Matthew Ellison

From Communicator magazine, Autumn 2007

I chose to review this article because I am interested in this new authoring tool, and I have attended a RoboHelp training course that was run by Matthew Ellison and he was a really good trainer.

The article starts with an introduction to MadPak. It is a tool that enables authors to create user assistance software. It is based on Flare, MadCap’s help authoring tool. Matthew states that he is reviewing the complete MadPak suite of products, with Flare features added since version 1.0.

Flare 3.0 is a new authoring tool, and because it is new, developers haven’t had to deal with outdated legacy code. It has been developed in C#, with all of its files XML compliant. Flare has impressive single sourcing capabilities, which means it can generate output in a range of different formats, for example onscreen, and print-oriented, from the same project. It also provides the ability to exclude specific content from each output type. It can also allow authors to insert a chunk of information in a topic and reference it in multiple topics, and can support multiple TOCs.

Flare’s interface

Flash has a customisable interface and Matthew says that it has numerous window panes that are used for multiple purposes, which can make it quite difficult for inexperienced users to get the hang of. Consequently he recommends that all users invest in a high-resolution monitor to organise the window panes more effectively.

Topic editing and formatting

Matthew explains that topics are ‘created and edited using Flare’s XML Editor. (p.22). Authors must use XHTML because Flash doesn’t let you edit any XML variant. He goes on to say that the XML Editor has some powerful hidden features such as selecting and moving blocks of text, and sorting list items automatically. You can also apply CSS classes and elements within them, and he thinks that people who have been shielded from the technical details may find this a bit challenging as it requires some knowledge of CSS properties and values.

Source control integration

The new version 3.0 allows authors to integrate Flare with Visual Source Safe, which is a tool that I myself used to use for version control and sorely miss because it is easy to use and reliable. Source control allows authors to check out files to work on them, and then check their changes in when they have finished a unit of work. This means that no two authors can work on the same file at the same time and therefore the system ‘prevents authors from inadvertently over-writing each other’s work (p.23). This is a really powerful, and important aspect of version control. Another is that it provides the ability to track changes made on a file, and to ‘roll back’ to a particular version if the changes made are not accurate.

WebHelp plus

WebHelp plus allows users to search non-XHTML file types such as PDF or MS Word files. It also allows fast searching and automatic merging of outputs from multiple projects

FrameMaker import

The user can import FrameMaker documents, mapping styles in the process. Matthew states that the user can also re-import a document, for instance if it has changed, but this has the disadvantage of losing any changes made to the content in Flare.

Feedback

Matthew states that ‘Flare 3.0 has a feedback feature that enables users to comment on Help topics.’ (p.23). This is a very important and useful way to improve the quality of documentation, and indeed to guage whether users are actually reading the information! Matthew does make the important point, however, that this feature requires a financial investment to ’set up a server-based service that will receive and store the feedback data’ (p.23) Thus, the cost of the implementation of such a server must be weighed up against the financial quality reward that regular customer feedback will provide.

Mimic

Mimic allows users to create demonstrations and interactive tutorials. It offers two output formats; Adobe Flash or MadCap Mimic movie format. The advantage of the latter is being able to compress movies into smaller files than with using Flash. However, users require MadCap movie viewer or help viewer to view them.

Capture

Capture allows users to capture screen shots, and one of its unique features is that it lets the user ‘re-capture’ things from the original capture, long after it was first captured. This seemed like quite a good idea to me, unless you were writing about something that may potentially change e.g. a software GUI from one version to the next.

Echo

This function allows users to add audio to an HTML page

Integration of the MadPak products

To finish, Matthew concludes that these tools can be used in a variety of different ways and that the MadPak suite ‘offers a complete and complementary set of tools that share a common user interface paradigm and integrate well together’ (p.24.) He does, however, state that users must be prepared for a steep learning curve.

I’m now wondering if there’s a 30 day trial I can download to start using to see if I get on with using this product. It sounds quite similar to RoboHelp, which I used in a previous job, and the same sort of steep learning curve that I had when I first arrived in my current job, and had to learn DITA.

Has anyone used this software? If so do you have any suggestions or comments that I might find helpful?

References

Ellison, M (2007 Autumn). Review of the Madpak authoring suite. Communicator, p. 22.

April 28, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | 4 Comments

Writing java script for my multimedia problem and solution

Here I’ll try to explain how I wrote javascript and a function to change style sheets within my web site. A lot of trial and effort was involved!!!

I wrote a javascript called changestyle.js. Each pages uses this script to change the style sheet.

<div class=”button_bar”>
<button class=”but” onclick=”changeSheets(1);”>Style 1</button>
<button class=”but” onclick=”changeSheets(2);”>Style 2</button>
<button class=”but” onclick=”changeSheets(3);”>Style 3</button>

<button class=”but” onclick=”changeSheets(4);”>Style 4</button>
</div>

One of the initial style sheets that I created had the following detail:

I initially named the style sheets sheet1.css, sheet2.css sheet3.css, sheet4.css. These style sheets are activated according to the button pressed.

I will probably change their names to be something more descriptive later on.

The styles are applied in the text, like this:

The button tags:

<button class=”but” onclick=”changeSheets(1);”>Style 1</button>

The onclick bit says when you click this, call the Javascript function called changeSheets, and tell it the number of the style sheet to use.

In the head tag in each page I specified the style sheets that are available:

So 1 corresponds to sheet1.css. The page itself doesn’t contain the javascript function; it is in the .js file. The page ‘knows’ about the js file and its function because it imported it in the head tag:

I wrote the following function:
function changeSheets(styleSheet){

if(document.styleSheets){
var numOfStyleSheets = document.styleSheets.length – 1;
for(var i=1; i < numOfStyleSheets+1 ; i++){
if(styleSheet == i){
document.styleSheets[i].disabled=false;
}else{
document.styleSheets[i].disabled=true;
}
}
}
}

This function takes a style sheet number as its input. The browser has a list of style sheets in memory, document style sheets. When one of the pages on my web site page loads a style sheet file, the browser adds it to its internal list.

Then the ‘for’ loop goes round each style sheet in the list and compares the number it is currently looking at with the style sheet number requested when clicking the button. If the style sheet number matches it sets the disabled attribute to false – ie it activates it

if(styleSheet == i){
document.styleSheets[i].disabled=false;

If the numbers don’t match the function turns the style sheet off.

Phew!

April 28, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

Introduction to the multimedia problem I have identified

How I identified my multimedia problem

Whilst studying one of the first units in the MA, one of the lecturers, Ian Kemble, gave us a letter that was written to the ISTC (Institue of Scientific and Technical Communicators). The letter was from someone who wanted to know how to become a technical author.

Solution and target audience

I then had to the idea to produce a web site and that my target audience were people with questions about how to become a technical author. I thought I could incorporate my own experinces on the subject, as I have now been a technical author for nearly four years. I also wanted to do some research on possible, typical, questions that someone in this position might ask.

I therefore searched on Google and found a cherry leaf web site which had the following questions:

http://www.cherryleaf.com/tareport.htm

§ In Chapter Two, we ask “What do technical authors do?”

§ In Chapter Three, we ask “How many technical authors are there?”

§ In Chapter Four, we ask “What skills do they need?”

§ In Chapter Five, we ask “How much do they earn?”

§ In Chapter Six, we look at the software tools do they use

§ In Chapter Seven, we look at what to do if you have no experience

§ In Chapter Eight, we ask “Where can I get training?”

§ In Chapter Nine, we ask “What are the future prospects for technical authors?”

§ In Chapter Ten, we ask “Where do I find a job?”

Cherry Leaf are a reputible technical training centre and as such I thought these questions were fairly representitive of ones they may have been asked my people wanting to become technical authors and as such I initially used a considerable amount of these questions in a web site created using Dreamweaver. This project would allow me to become familiar with, and use, Dreamweaver, as I had no experience of using it. I created a few topics in Dreamweaver and then used the style sheet 3col_leftNav.css to produce the first draft of the web site which looked like this: I then decided that I would like to create some buttons that the user could press which would change the style of the web style, just like you can using wordpress. I would create my style sheets from scratch, and not use the one above because it contained too many fields for my requirements, plus I wanted to create some more colourful, eye catching style sheets. Doing this would not only let me become more familiar with, and design cascading style sheets (css), but I would need to investgate how to change between the style sheets. I *think* this involves writing java script but I will need to investigate…..

So, to summarise, this project will enable me to:

1. Learn how to create a web site in Dreamweaver

2. Learn how to create different style sheets (css) in Dreamweaver

4. Learn how to publish my web site on to WordPress.

References

http://www.cherryleaf.com/tareport.htm

http://communicationarts.co.uk/author.html

http://www.istc.org.uk/

http://www.prospects.ac.uk/downloads/occprofiles/profile_pdfs/M5_Technical_author.pdf

April 28, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

Literature review #6 – At the cutting edge

At the cutting edge

Jeff Haycock, Roger Smith and Brian Wilkinson describe Rolls-Royce’s new methods for creating more precise cutaways in less time

From Communicator magazine, Spring 2008

In this article the authors discuss constructing a detailed 3D engine cutaway, which they say is a job that gives the most job satisfaction in a publications portfolio. It can, however, be very time consuming and consequently very costly. Producing cutaways is also difficult because if last minute design changes.

This article talks about an Industrial Trent gas turbine cutaway image which was a by-product of a new tooling product to show the detailed removal of the front and rear sections of the engine using a 3D format. The project needed to show a significant amount of the inside of the engine because the removal procedure was so complex. Because of this the authors built a full 3D model of the engine that they could on which to base the detailed cutaway. This would allow for any modifications to the engine as and when required.

They had to deal with the size of files, and carried out all their 3D model assembly work using IsoDraw CADProcess to build detailed 3D assemblies without their PCs becoming overloaded. They tried using other image files but although they produced high quality files, they were extremely large and therefore not practical. This made it impossible for them to create that would contain many thousands of components.

The full engine was too large to deal with sufficiently and therefore they divided it into modules. This made it easier to assemble the components and produce 3D snapshots.

They developed two files for each of the modules in the engine. One file contained the complete 3D assembly without the cut which was important because they could make changes to the assemblies easily of there were any modifications. The other file contained the same assembly after a cut had been made through the components

The files then became too big to handle so each new module had to be fitted into position. They composed each layer into the master image, with all the excess lines removed. They gradually built up all of the components and when they had finished they could see the assembled engine.

They then used Adobe Photoshop to create depth, textures, and reflections. They used layers to do this and used the ability of PhotoShop to mimic airbrush methods to create a realistic looking finish. When they were happy with the image they merged the layers to reduce the size of the files, saving it as a TIFF file, with LZW compression.

They had to apply a last minute modification just as they were about to go to print. They did this by receiving the new module as a Unigraphics file which they translated and superimposed onto the original line work cutaway. They then reduced the duplicated and redundant lines.

They conclude the article by saying that they can now produce ‘extremely detailed, photo-realistic 3D cutaways for any variation of the industrial Trent in a very short time. The benefits are plain to see. We move on with the technology but meeting our business requirements will always be paramount.’ (p. 32).

I initially chose this article to review because of the really impressive and detailed cross section drawing, and this article has taught me about diagrams, of which I have the least experience when it comes to authoring as we are not encouraged in my job to use diagrams unless absolutely necessary because we do not translate into many languages it does not have a significant effect on the cost. Do any of you have experience with CAD? Let me know what you think of the article.

References

Haycock, J, Smith, R, Wilkinson, B (2008 Spring). At the cutting edge. Communicator, p. 30.

April 28, 2008 Posted by authorclare | Uncategorized | | 1 Comment

Literature review #4 – Multimedia content rocks!

Multimedia content rocks!

How a new generation of information consumers are driving the use of multimedia in electronic publications, by Rhonda Wainwright.

Communicator magazine, Winter 2007.

In this article Rhonda Wainright talks about how ‘commercial and technical publishers alike are facing a new generation of sophisticated information consumers that expect and demand intelligent and interactive documents.’(p30).

Wainwright talks about the way that a new breed of information consumer is influencing the way content is published. These users have grown up playing graphically intensive video games, compared to the board games of past generations. Today’s students are expected to be fluent with the internet before reaching college age and therefore when they start work they expect to have intelligent information at their fingertips.

Wainwright then explains how consumer demand drives innovation, and that multimedia rocks because ‘multimedia improves the user experience’ and it ‘significantly reduces the amount of text that must be authored and perhaps translated into other languages.’ (p.30).

‘Locator graphics’ allow the user to move directly from a graphic to the text that describes it. These allow the user to ‘drill down’ into pictures to investigate their detail.

The article then talks about intelligent graphics such as hot spots and hyperlinks, these all aid user navigation and experience of multimedia content. Digital photos are useful because they provide a clear illustration, for example when a part replacement is necessary. The article then talks about animations, simulations and videos and interactive 3D models as examples of effective multimedia communication tool.

Wainwright advises users to always consider the audience and their computing environment when choosing multimedia content as, for example, active x components may be restricted and poor bandwidth may cause graphics to display and refresh at slow speeds.

The article then talks about ‘making multimedia your friend’ by using technologies that ‘overcome the challenges of creating, managing, delivering, and leveraging multimedia content’ (p.32) Such examples include a CAD system already present in an organization, with the staff with skills to use it. Other such examples include choosing a flexible delivery platform.

This article interested me because, as Wainwright points out, it is all very well having flash and impressive multimedia tools, but you have to be sure your audience and their working environment can appreciate the content in the way the author intended. I think this is a very important point, and stresses one of the golden rules of technical communication – always consider your audience.

Authorclare’s Weblog

My Multimedia Communication blog

Code for my web site

My table of contents code

Reflection and conclusion to my multimedia problem

A further problem I need to investigate

Updates to my multimedia problem and solution

Literature review #5 – Review of the MadPak authoring suite

Review of the MadPak authoring suite

Writing java script for my multimedia problem and solution

Introduction to the multimedia problem I have identified

Literature review #6 – At the cutting edge

At the cutting edge

Literature review #4 – Multimedia content rocks!

Multimedia content rocks!

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