ITauthor

You’ve been asked to update a manual containing diagrams that were created in Adobe Illustrator. You need to update some of the diagrams but you don’t have a copy of Illustrator and there’s no budget to buy you a copy. What do you do?

Answer: download and install the free, open source alternative to Illustrator:
 
http://www.inkscape.org/download/

Inkscape allows you to import Illustrator-format .ai files. You can then edit the diagram in Inkscape and output a new .png or .emf for the manual.

The only problems I found doing this were:

1. Text entered in Illustrator will typically have some automatic kerning added to make it look just right. Inkscape can’t handle kerning and you won’t be able to edit the text until you remove it. So you need to select the text you want to edit and choose Text > Remove Manual Kerns.
2. Inkscape add lots of object groups. Things are grouped within other things within other groups within other groups … So, to move individual objects around you need to click on the thing you want to move (which will usually select everything in the diagram) and keep pressing Ctrl + Shift + G until enough of the groups are ungrouped and you can see a dotted selection box around the object you want to move.

I really like Inkscape. It does most of the things you can do in Illustrator – in a slightly clunky way perhaps, but it’s a powerful tool and will allow you to produce professional-looking diagrams.

If you just want to create diagrams from scratch and you don’t need to edit existing Illustrator diagrams, you might prefer to try out a true Web 2.0 solution instead: Raven – one of the suite of image tools from Aviary.

Raven is a free online vector design tool that works completely within the browser. It’s got a very good-looking interface and I found its Bezier curve editing much easier to use than the same thing in Inkscape. But, because some of the functionality is happening on the server side, you have to put up with a little delay uploading and downloading files to and from the server if you’re going to be creating and maintaining them in Raven. For a browser app, though, it’s a pretty amazing piece of coding and design work.

I only create simple diagrams, but if you’re a bit of an artist you should have a look at this video to see what you can do in Raven:

And if you’re looking for a free alternative to Photoshop or SnagIt, check out what else Aviary does in the browser:

This was a strange one. I installed a whole stack of fonts that must have included a corrupt version of Times New Roman. Everything looked fine on screen but when I generated a PDF from FrameMaker using the Adobe PDF printer driver, the characters in Times New Roman got strangely mangled.

As it happened, the only thing that used Times New Roman in the template I was using was page number in the index. These came out with hash marks followed by numbers that were completely different from the numbers in the original index:

I went into Control Panel > Fonts and deleted the Times New Roman fonts, then downloaded new versions from typedfont.com.

Note: If you’re using typedfont.com you might not, at first sight, notice the download link. It’s a little link halfway down the page, just above the font table:

However, after installing the new fonts (in Vista: right-click the font file and choose Install), the problem remained.

The problem is that when there’s a font problem the printer’s Font Substitution Table gets modified, telling the driver to use another font instead of the font that has a problem. You can repair the font, but the Font Substitution Table doesn’t get modified back to remove the substitution. You’ve got to do that yourself.

To remove the font substitution for a printer (in my case the Adobe PDF “printer”):

1. Go to Control Panel > Printers.
2. Right-click the affected printer and choose Properties.
3. In the Properties dialog box, go to the Device Settings tab.
4. Expand the section headed Font Substitution Table:
   
     
5. Find the affected font.
6. Click the substituted font and change the setting back to <Don’t Substitute>:
   
   
7. Click OK.
8. While you’re about it – for good measure – go to the General tab.
9. Click Printing Preferences.
10. In the Printing Preferences dialog box, go to the Paper/Quality tab.
11. Click Advanced:
    
    
12. In the Advance Options dialog box, change the TrueType Font setting to Download as Softfont:
    
    
13. Change the PostScript Output Option to Optimize for Portability.
14. Change the TrueType Font Download Option to Outline.
15. Click OK on all the open dialog boxes.

If you were having the same problem I was having, it will now be fixed.

The marketing manager at my work got in touch today to ask about recording screencasts of product demos. After replying, I thought the information might be interesting to others. So here’s her email and my reply.

Note: I’ve changed the names.

From: Lesley …
Sent: 10 March 2009 15:00
To: 'Alistair Christie'
Subject: best tool for the job?

Alistair,

I have a requirement to capture a demo the solutions team has been working on – all screen activity and voiceover.  What I want to be able to do is give this to the sales team along with the kit so they can do the demos themselves.  I also want to take this file and have our designers create a flash movie for download from the web site.

I wanted to ask your advice on the best tool to use for this job?  I have looked at GoTo Meeting and Webex Meeting recorders as well as Camtasia.

My slight problem is that Mike is my voiceover person and Ben is my demo click through person – both based in different locations.  This is why I looked at webinar software for recording but it doesn’t look like its straightforward to record voice and clicks on screen in multi locations.

Any advice/hints or tips – I know you have carried out this kind of thing before.

Thanks,
Lesley

Lesley

Here's how I've done this before. You're probably not going to like this! But you asked.

I've never been able to do voice over + what's on screen in one go. One of them always goes wrong. So the system I settled on is as follows:

1) Write the script!

I've tried improvising but you end up with lots of editing to do, so it's quicker to spend the time up front writing a complete script (word for word, not notes).

2) Go through the demo speaking the script and recording what's on screen - but concentrate on getting the screen capture right. I usually don't even bother recording the voice at this stage. That way, if you make a slip with the voice you just stop clicking/moving the mouse until you're ready to pick up the script again, make a note of the time, then continue (i.e. just keep the screen capture rolling). That way you can go and edit out a bit from the screen capture.

3) When you've captured the screen stuff OK and you're happy with it, go into Camtasia and chop out the bits you noted down. When you do this you've got to go through that bit of the script so that you make sure you haven't cut too much out.

4) In Camtasia, generate a video (Flash or AVI or whatever - doesn't matter at this stage).

5) Using sound recording software (like Audacity, which if free), record yourself speaking through the script while watching the video. You generally have to do this a few times until you get the timing right.

6) Save the recording as a .wav or .mp3.

7) Back in Camtasia, import the sound recording and drag it onto the time line of the video.

8) Play through the whole thing and make sure the sound and video match up. Usually at this stage you need to do some fine tuning, but Camtasia allows you to pause or cut the video and/or pause or cut the sound recording, so it's pretty easy to get it all spot on

9) Output the final demo video.

Camtasia has a huge variety of output formats, resolutions, styles - including .wmv for showing in Windows Media Player, .m4v or .mov for iTunes, or a .swf (Flash) file nicely embedded in a Web page. If you want you can easily grab the Flash file from this page and stick it in another page (e.g. on the company Web site).

Technically there's nothing to it, but if you want to produce something half decent it will take lots of time and patience. The one I did for … last year took 3 full days to produce.

As for folks being in separate places, that shouldn't be difficult, Mike can be on the phone speaking the script, looking at what Ben's doing on screen (Acrobat ConnectNow is good for this - like WebEx but free), while Ben records what he's doing in Camtasia. Ben can then put together the video (without sound) and send this to Mike for him to record the voice over. When Mike's got this just right he can send the sound file back to Ben and Ben can finish it off.

Job's a good un!

Alistair

I wonder how many people who have installed Windows Live Writer have ever again written a Wordpress blog post from within the Wordpress Web interface. Surely not many.

Just an idle thought.

I just installed the Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer and I’m about to see how it works. The idea is that when you post to your blog a dialog box pops up with some boiler plate words, the blog post and a TinyURL. You can modify the template, and you can edit the message before it gets tweeted - or at least I’m hoping you can. Let’s find out.

Something Ann Gentle said on the Communications from DMN podcast made me think about they way I use blogs and forums. This is especially relevant right now as I’ve got variations of the same question sitting on three forums.

What she said (about 24 minutes into the show), while discussing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book Groundswell, was:

There’s this ladder of involvement in social media. Some people like to write blog entries. Some people only like to comment on blog entries. Some people like to review products. Some people just like to read other people’s reviews and act on that review.

I’m an occasional blogger. Sometimes I’ll post every day, other times months will go by and I don’t post at all (usually when I’m up to my eyeballs at work). In some ways I admire the committed bloggers who write lengthy and well thought out posts every day without fail – and sometimes more than one a day. But I do often wonder why they’re spending so much time and thought on this rather than on their paid employment, or their family.

I’m also an occasional blog reader. I use Feedblitz to mail me posts from lots of blogs, but a lot of the time I just read the summaries and never the whole blog post, or I just delete the email without reading anything. My reason for not reading more blog posts is that I know that if I didn’t ration myself quite strictly I could easily spend several hours a day doing nothing else but reading blogs.

What I’m not is a commenter. I rarely ever comment on blog posts and as for forums, I can’t remember ever answering a question on a forum. And this makes me feel bad for two reasons:

1. I love it when people email me, or add a comment to my blog, with a point about something I’ve said in a post, or on a podcast. However, I rarely ever contact the writers/hosts of the blogs/podcasts I enjoy reading/listening to regularly. So they never know I’m out here, one of an invisible audience, enjoying their work. I really should do something about that!
2. I don’t use forums except as a last resort – at which times they often prove invaluable. I have some questions out in forums at the moment as part of my search for the right online help architecture/method for our new applications. And I remember back in 2002 when I was doing some pretty hairy stuff with RoboHelp, I got a lot of help on the Help forums from people like Rick Stone, Rob Chandler and Char James-Tanny. But I’ve never felt any inclination to become an MVP of anything myself and watch the forums on the lookout for people to help.

Am I just a bad, self-centred person?

Well, no, I don’t think so. For me it’s all about a balance of guilt. I hate spending much time at work doing anything that’s not what I’m being paid to do. I pretty much feel like my company has bought my time from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch) and therefore they own my labour during those hours and if I’m writing a blog post or helping someone on a forum I’m essentially cheating my employers. So I make every effort not to be drawn into this kind of thing, and if it does happen I make sure I work extra hours at the end of the day to make up for it. I think this is the generations-old Calvinistic influence showing through.

And when I’m not in work I feel guilty if I spend too much time blogging or preparing podcasts, because I have a wife and kids who deserve some of my time and attention. So once I’ve done some blogging and some podcasting, that just doesn’t leave much time for anything else that would take me away from my family.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things. Maybe, as Ann Gentle suggests, it simply that there are some people who mainly just blog, some people who mainly comment and some people who never blog or comment.

About six years ago we got a new manager at work and he had trouble with all the names and acronyms we use. He asked me to put together a Web page of terms and explanations for our intranet. But - without doing any consumer research - I thought I’d go one better and, using a vast amount of home brewed Perl and Javascript, I construct a Glossary site that was essentially a Web front end for a little database. Anyone in the company could add new glossary terms and definitions or edit existing ones. I spent quite a bit of time on it (my own personal time because the guilt thing prevented me from effectively charging the company for my work on this), and the end product was pretty damned good and did things like emailing specified addresses every time a change was made (because I was a little bit worried that a loginless system would tempt someone to go in there are write scurrilous definitions). However, in six years, although I know people (mainly new-starts) refer to it, no one but me ever adds or changes anything. It’s exactly like me and Wikipedia. On average I probably use Wikipedia a few times a week and have done for years. But I’ve never ever edited or added a single thing. I’m not proud of this, I’ve just never felt any desire or obligation to do so.

Communications from DMN:
Talking shop with Anne Gentle