Archive for 2013
A Perspective on Technical and Content Writing in India – Part II
By Nikhil Khandekar Special for TCC Content Developer, India (Continues from Part I) In India, technical communication was introduced by the emergence of IT in the 1990s. Our mathematical and scientific acumen for all things IT was what led to our stumbling onto technical communication. Stumble we had to; there was no working our way…
Read MoreA Perspective on Technical and Content Writing in India – Part I
By Nikhil Khandekar Special for TCC Content Developer, India The biggest challenge that the development of technical communication and documentation faces in India is the general and perceived lack of facility with the English language. Website content, email communication, documentation, and even books and articles produced in India suffer a bias in the Western mind…
Read MoreHow to Mask Images in Adobe FrameMaker with Graphic Frames
Did you know that in Adobe FrameMaker you can use a graphic frame to mask images and graphic objects? 1) First draw a graphic image with any FM graphic tool you like. Or import an image into your FM document. 2) Draw a graphic frame with your graphic frame tool. 3) Grab and drag your…
Read MoreHow to Program MS Word with VBA – An Introduction
Underneath MS Word’s unassuming document interface there is a very powerful code engine — VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). You can use VBA to program Word all kinds of things that are not possible to achieve by just using Word’s built-in menu functions. How to display VBA Editing Environment 1) Open your MS Word document…
Read MoreHow to Use MS Word’s Hide Text Function to Create a Conditional Text Effect
MS Word does not have a dedicated “Conditional Text” functionality like Adobe FrameMaker does. But by using Word’s “hidden text” functionality, you can achieve a similar “conditional text” effect. Imagine you are writing a Thank You letter to your customers for buying two different types of products, with hard-to-remember serial numbers and images: MAXI JUICER…
Read MoreHow to Draw Symmetrical Objects in Adobe FrameMaker
Granted, Adobe FrameMaker is not designed as the mother of all illustration programs. Its graphic capabilities are limited but still plenty for most general purposes if you know how to use FM’s graphic tools. Here is an easy method I use to draw symmetrical objects in FrameMaker. 1) Make a line drawing by using the…
Read MoreHow to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain
How to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain I heard about Dr.Explain only recently. It’s a great layout and text editor for creating all kinds of technical manuals and help files. Especially for dedicated MS Word users, it offers a wealth of options, including the ability to capture automatically-annotated screenshots that even RoboHelp…
Read MoreHow to Import Adobe FrameMaker 11 Object Styles from one Document to Another
© Ugur Akinci Once you create your preferred Object Styles for a technical document, you do not need to re-create them for other files of the book. You can just import them from one file to all the other documents in the collection. Select File > Import > Formats to display the Import Formats dialog…
Read MoreHow to Create Object Styles in Adobe FrameMaker
One of the great new features introduced with Adobe FrameMaker is the “Object Styles” — the ability to assign styles to anchored frames, text frames, images, etc. By using Object Styles, for example, you can make sure all your anchored frames throughout a document will be of the same size, positioned to the left of…
Read MoreHow to Automatically Import Adobe Acrobat Reader Comments into an Adobe FrameMaker 11 Technical Document
© Ugur Akinci Adobe Acrobat is great for adding all kinds of notes and comments to a PDF document. You don’t even need to have the Pro version to do that. Acrobat Reader XI, which is free to download, comes with great built-in text commenting and graphic annotating tools. Yet the real works begins once…
Read More