How to Join Two Open Paths in Adobe Illustrator

The PEN is one of the most powerful tools in Adobe Illustrator: You basically can draw anything you like with it. With PEN you can draw both OPEN and CLOSED paths: More often than not, in technical illustration we use CLOSED paths to represent different drawing objects — buttons, circuit boards, capacitors, door bells, car…

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How to Insert a MS Word Table into MS PowerPoint Slide

I love copying and pasting as much as the copy-paster next door 🙂 But sometimes the results are, well… let’s say, “less than acceptable.” Problem For example, when you’re trying to insert a MS Word table into a MS PowerPoint slide, the good’old copy-and-paste trick just won’t work. Here is our Word table: Select the…

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How to Display MS Word 2007 Ribbon When It Disappears

© Ugur Akinci It happens… sometimes when you’re in the midst of a project, your MS Word 2007 ribbon just disappears… Not displaying your ribbon has its advantage: it increases your screen real-estate. You’d have more room to display your document. But in terms of functionality and ease of use, it’s a nasty inconvenience. Each…

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A Source of Potential Component Conflict when Multiple Authors Work in Structured Authoring Environment

Multiple authors writing “components” instead of “pages” is the future of technical communications (if not technical training and e-learning). When it comes to documentation, it really makes sense to “write once and publish multiple times”, as the saying goes. And that’s only possible if we all get used to writing “components” (sometimes also referred to…

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How to Edit Uneditable Text in Photoshop

A Photoshop incident that happened to me recently… Problem Imagine you have a drawing, a “legacy document”, which includes some text that you need to change. Since the drawing’s layers have been “flattened out” quite some time ago and it’s now a pure raster image (like .JPG or .GIF) you cannot obviously use your Text…

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