Archive

Clever Title Case Perl Script

Published
by
roger
on 2008-05-21 @ 14:05
in Coding and Tools
. 0 Comments

John Gruber has released a clever Perl script that transforms selected text into title case (without simply capitalizing the first letter of each word as many so-called title case functions do).

The script uses a list of “small words” which are not capitalized based on guidelines from the New York Times Manual of Style.

It’s a Perl script, so save it as a text file and you can use it anywhere where Perl works. I use it as a system-wide service (with the shortcut Command-Shift-T) via Jesper’s excellent (and free) ThisService utility.

Thanks for a very useful addition to the writer’s toolbox!

FrameMaker 8.0.3 Patch Available

Published
by
roger
on 2008-05-13 @ 13:49
in FrameMaker and Software
. 0 Comments

FrameMaker 8 iconMahesh Gupta has announced the release of a FrameMaker 8.0.3 patch, which addresses a long list of bugs and workflow issues, including the proper resolution of DITA content references.

The update is available via the Adobe Update Manager (Help > Updates), and should show up on the FrameMaker Downloads page sometime soon.

oXygen 9.2 Improves DITA Support

Published
by
roger
on 2008-05-11 @ 19:20
in DITA, Software and Tools
. 0 Comments

Syncro Soft has released version 9.2 of its <oXygen/> XML Editor, a cross-platform XML authoring tool. The new version includes a new XML Author mode, which provides a streamlined interface tailored to the needs of writers who need to focus on document content and don’t need immediate access to the Schema Editor, XSLT or DTD development tools.

(XML Author is also available as a separate product at 60% of the cost of the full XML Editor suite, though the Author version doesn’t include the Subversion client, which is quite useful in its own right.)

Version 9.2 also includes a number of DITA-specific workflow and usability improvements such as a new DITA Maps Manager to assist with common map authoring tasks, a new Insert Content Reference dialog to aid in the selection of conref IDs, and a bundled version of the recently released DITA Open Toolkit version 1.4.2.1.

Adobe RoboHelp Packager for AIR

Published
by
roger
on 2008-04-28 @ 11:48
in Online Help and Software
. 0 Comments

Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez has posted an online training session on the new RoboHelp Packager for AIR, a new Adobe Labs download that allows you to roll a RoboHelp project into a standalone app that runs on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform.

AIR is beginning to look like an interesting cross-platform option for online help and performance support systems, since you can include typical navigation aids (such as table of contents, index, search, glossary, favorites, etc.), provide auto-updates and even roll in existing PDF content into a standalone package that will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

The AIR runtime is a free download that includes a WebKit browser and Adobe Flash engine to enable desktop use of Internet applications–even offline. So while the technology is fairly new, it may prove very useful in the development of cross-platform help solutions.

[via Silke Fleischer]

Spaces in HTML Help Project Paths

Published
by
roger
on 2008-03-18 @ 22:56
in Online Help and Software
. 0 Comments

Like so many other applications, Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop often chokes on project files whose paths contain spaces.

If you double-click a HTML Help Project File (HHP) in a location whose path contains spaces, the HTML Help Workshop throws an error when you click the Compile button and refuses to compile the CHM file.

Cannot open the file ""C:\Folder Name\File Name.hhp"".

You can work around this issue by removing the quotes from the path shown in the Create a compiled file dialog before you click the Compile button, but you still won’t be able to save any changes you’ve made to the HHP file.

SOLUTION: Instead of double-clicking, open the HHP file from within the Help Workshop via File > Open. This helps the Workshop to handle the paths properly and you will be able to save your changes and compile as expected.

Using Mac VPN Clients with Virtual Machines

Published
by
roger
on 2008-03-11 @ 17:16
in Mac and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

If you use Parallels or VMware Fusion and a Mac VPN client such as VPN Tracker, you can share your VPN connection between the host Mac and the guest PC by setting the network adaptor to share the host’s Internet connection via NAT.

This connection method also has other advantages, as the VMware Fusion Release Notes explain:

“VMware Fusion’s default network connection type for new virtual machines is NAT, which will prevent the spread of viruses over the network into the virtual machine, and will only expose the virtual machine to external viruses through browser security flaws when you browse the Internet.”

The idea of sharing VPN connections with Windows applications via Parallels is touted as a VPN Tracker feature and explained in detail in a how-to PDF, but it works equally well with VMware Fusion.

The key is setting the network adaptor to shared networking (NAT) as opposed to the bridged or host-only options shown in the VMware settings screenshot below.

screenshot

With this approach, network traffic from your virtual machine is routed through the existing VPN connection on the host Mac, so there’s no need to install a separate VPN client application on the guest PC.

FrameMaker 8.0.2 Update Available

Published
by
roger
on 2008-02-06 @ 18:05
in FrameMaker and Software
. 0 Comments

Mahesh Gupta, Adobe’s FrameMaker Product Manager announced the availability of the Version 8.0.2 update in a post on the Technical Communication blog.

This patch (8.0p273) must be applied on top of 8.0.1 (8.0p266) only.

The update covers a series of minor bugs and annoyances, including several related to Unicode characters and XML roundtripping and the status bar shortcuts (Ctrl+F8, Ctrl+F9) for the paragraph and character catalogs (see the post for the full list).

The update is available via the Adobe Update Manager (Help > Updates), and should show up on the FrameMaker Downloads page sometime soon.

Sharing DITA-OT in OS X & Boot Camp

Published
by
roger
on 2008-01-14 @ 19:15
in DITA and Mac
. 0 Comments

If you’re using the DITA Open Toolkit on Mac OS X, you can’t generate compiled HTML Help (CHM) files directly, since Microsoft only offers the HTML Help Workshop for Windows.

But if you also run Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp, you can set up a single installation of the Open Toolkit on your Windows partition and use it to generate output from either operating system environment.

Essentially, you boot into Windows (via VMware, Parallels, or directly) and set up the toolkit there as usual.

Once you have the toolkit running under Windows, create a copy of the Ant build file for your project, adjust the paths for access from Mac OS X and save it under a new name in the DITA-OT directory on your Windows partition. (You’ll call this file later from the Terminal to build your project output on the Mac.)

Back on Mac OS, set up the environment variables required by the toolkit.

You can do this by editing the .bash_profile file in your home directory, or if you don’t like editing hidden UNIX files by hand, you can use freeware such as RCEnvironment or SSHKeychain, which provide a simple dialog that allows you to define environment variables like in Windows.

(In the background, both tools simply write to the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file. SSHKeychain also serves as a nice Mac equivalent to PuTTY, but that’s another story…)

The key here is to use the absolute path to the toolkit installation on the Boot Camp partition. For example, if your Windows partition is named BOOTCAMP and the toolkit lives there at C:\DITA-OT1.4.1, you might set the DITA_HOME variable like this:

DITA_HOME=/Volumes/BOOTCAMP/DITA-OT1.4.1

You can then define the other variables relative to the toolkit directory with entries like this:

ANT_HOME=$DITA_DIR/tools/ant

Note: If you use either of the aforementioned tools to edit ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist, you’ll need to use the full paths for the remaining variables, as $VARIABLE values are not expanded when this file is read.

Once the variables are all set, you’ll need to log in to OS X again to activate them.

Then with a command like this, you can build output from the Terminal using the Mac version of the build file you edited above:

ant -f your-mac-build-file.xml html

To build CHM output, switch to Boot Camp, run startcmd.bat in the DITA-OT directory, and enter something like this on the command line:

ant -f your-windows-build-file.xml chm

If both your build files are set to share an output folder on your Mac, your files will land in the same place, no matter which operating system you build them on.

DITA-OT 1.4.1 Released

Published
by
roger
on 2007-12-03 @ 16:26
in DITA and Open Source
. 0 Comments

An updated version of the DITA Open Toolkit was released last week with several patches, bugfixes and minor enhancements to provide greater control over the output directory and improve error reporting (see the announcement for the full list).

One very useful patch included in this version finally permits styling of the Table of Contents file in HTML output via CSS.

SnagIt for Free!

Published
by
roger
on 2007-11-27 @ 16:59
in Software and Tools
. 0 Comments

Over at Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal points out a great deal on the popular Windows screenshot tool SnagIt. TechSmith is currently offering version 7.2 for free download as a promotional deal intended to attract users to the latest version (which is 8.2 as of this post).

So if you don’t need all the bells & whistles the later versions include and are just looking for a screenshot workhorse to take you beyond ALT+PRINT (and don’t already own a copy of HyperSnap or a similar tool), follow Amit’s instructions for a free SnagIt license.

If you’re interested in screencasting tools for full motion recording, there’s a similar deal on Camtasia Studio.

For Mac OS X, check out Snapz Pro X, which does both still images and full motion capture.