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Back after 6 months.

I start off with a short recap of what’s been happening in tech authoring while I’ve been away.

Most of this show is about DocBook and the DocBook XSL Stylesheets. More about DocBook at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docbook

There’s also a really nice tutorial at:
http://www.codeproject.com/winhelp/docbook_howto.asp
which includes some very handy tips about using sed and make to automate processes at the end of the article. For an example of Web pages created from DocBook source, using the DocBook XSL stylesheets, see:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/

This is pretty much what you get, out of the box, when you do a chunked transformation of a whole book’s worth of DocBook. Not pretty, but functional.

eDE (e-novative DocBook Environment) is a wrap-up of various tools that provides a simple command-line interface to processing DocBook files and outputting HTML, PDF or HTML Help. You might find it easier to install and use than explicitly installing xsltproc and the DocBook stylesheets and running using them directly. However, I think you get more control by doing it yourself. It depends whether the out-of-the-box results are good enough for you, or whether you need to adjust the results (in which case eDE is probably not for you):
http://www.e-novative.info/software/ede.php

Flare version 2.0 is now out. I’ll talk about this next time round. Meanwhile, Madcap’s Marketing department have produced a flier describing what version 2.0 will offer:
www.madcapsoftware.com/support/files/downloads/mc_flare_v2.pdf
and, more importantly, you can download a free trial from the Madcap Web site.

Get in contact!

I’d love to know who’s listening and where you are, so contact me at: comments==AT==itauthor==DOT==com

Or put yourself on the ITauthor map: http://www.frappr.com/itauthor

The music I play is by Amplifico, and you can hear more of their music by going to the Podsafe Music Network (http://music.podshow.com/), clicking on Search Music and searching for Amplifico.

Not sure why you’d want to, but you can see my online Web page bookmarks at: http://del.icio.us/itauthor

Lots of background noise on this episode. Apologies for that. I will endeavour to improve the production quality of the next podcast. I’ll also try to sort out the levels in CastBlaster a bit better by next time.

Sorry no commenting on this blog any more. I got hit by a deluge of comment spam! But please send your comments to the email address in the podcast or, if possible, mail me an audio comment that I can put on the show.

Links

DocBook How To

A good nice tutorial on using DocBook.

DocBook Wiki

More information about DocBook.

MadCap Software

Go find out about what those crazy MadCap guys are up to now!

Tech Writer Voices

An interview-based podcast. Check out the interview with Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software.

ITauthor Notes - Sept 17, 2006

An entry in my ITauthor Notes blog describing how to use the XSL stylesheets.

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Warning
This podcast weighs in at a whopping 1 hour 32 minutes! Next time round I’ll try to be more concise, and I’ll try to cut out some of the ums and ahs, which should slim things down considerably.

Sound quality
I don’t know what happened with the sound quality, but it’s particularly poor. I recorded it on CastBlaster, in 10-minute chunks, moved these over to Cubase and put them together and added the music. This added some noise but the recording sounded not bad, but after exporting to MP3 the background hiss went way up and, although I tried various output options, I couldn’t improve things. So I tried running it through Clean to cut the noise, but this took forever and at the end I had something that had much less hiss, but apart from that sounded awful, so I decided to stick with the hissy version.

Next time round I might just try sticking with CastBlaster - but I’m not sure I’m up to recording one of these things live, without any editing. We’ll see. But for now you’ll just have to endure the hiss.

Have I put you off yet?

Contents
In this podcast I talk about:

1) Madcap Flare 1.0
Overall, my first impressions of Flare were very positive. I suspect future releases will do more interesting stuff. I couldn’t see many reasons to buy Flare if you already have the current version of RoboHelp, but if you’re new to help authoring and you need to buy an application, or you need to upgrade from an old version of RoboHelp, then Flare’s the way to go.

I mention an error message I got when switching from tag view. See: www.itauthor.com/notes/archives/2006/04/flare_error_mes.html

Some other first impressions of Flare:
www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/archives/0602/techwhirl-0602-00050.html
www.chmtools.com/forum/techwr-robohelp-or-webworks-epublisher-for-word-2000-and-4664.html

2) FrameMaker Day
I talk about attending a FrameMaker Day organised by Mekon, including a Q&A session with Karl Matthews, Adobe product manager for FrameMaker and RoboHelp.
Mekon: http://mekon.com/
Pectora: http://www.pectora.com/
Idiom: http://www.idiominc.com/

3) CVS and Subversion
Subversion book: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
SVK: I mention a Perlcast interview with the creator of SVK: http://perlcast.com/2006/03/07/interview-with-chia-liang-kao/

4) Alfresco and Joomla
Article on Alfresco: www.infoworld.com/article/05/10/31/HNalfrescoopensource_1.html Alfresco demo: www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/demonstrations/ Joomla: www.joomla.org/

5) TIBCO GI ”“ Javascript/Ajax development tool
Audible Ajax podcast - interview with Kevin Hakman of TIBCO: http://ajaxian.com/archives/audible-ajax-episode-15-kevin-hakman-of-tibco
A screencast of Tibco GI by Jon Udell: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/05/25.html

6) ITauthor Frappr map (please add a pin)
www.frappr.com/itauthor

7) Amplifico
On the Podsafe Music Network: http://music.podshow.com/index.php
Website: http://www.amplifico.net/

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Rather like the difficult fourth album, this, the fourth itauthor podcast, has been long in the making.

Well, actually the reason for the long gap between podcast 3 and this one is partly because of Christmas and partly because I just haven t got round to it. But here it is, started on January 31st, so technically January's podcast, in this episode I talk about Madcap Flare and why I think it might be the replacement for RoboHelp, but probably won't be the technical authoring application we've all been waiting for.

Once again thanks to everyone who has pinned themselves on my Frappr map (www.frappr.com/itauthor).

Tech authoring products mentioned in this podcast:

• Help Manual Help Studio
• Document! X
• Doc-To-Help
• WebWorks
• ePublisher Pro for FrameMaker
• AuthorIT
• FrameMaker
• RoboHelp
• Arbortext Editor
• XMetaL Author

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In which I talk about my attempt to upgrade Plone.

For details of what I did (step by step) see:

www.itauthor.com/authtools/plonezope/upgrading-to-2.1.1

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In which I break Russell Beattie s golden rule of podcasting by talking about podcasting.