FrameMaker

To celebrate the release of FrameMaker 16 (Summer 2020 release) for the month of August I’m giving the Tech Comm Tools community 40% off of the new digital versions of my books. To be clear, the FrameMaker 2020 Structured EDD workbook is already available (both print and digital), and the update to both the FrameMaker…

My friend and colleague, Tammy Van Boening recently shared her experiences with RoboHelp 2019 with regard to using SharePoint Online for version control. She’s written two detailed posts about specific issues on her site, and you can get to them using the links contained in this post. Tammy is a fantastic contract scientific technical communicator,…

Just a quick outline of the steps I take when Adobe installers won’t work. Got a favorite tip not covered here? Please add to the comments below and I’ll update the list. Run installer from a local drive This is first on the list because it may be the only thing that keeps you from…

SPOILER ALERT: I’m planning on an update to my Working with Content Fm reference book soon, and would love to get these UI elements tightened up in time for that next version. -Matt While teaching a structured authoring class recently, I noted a few things that would improve the FrameMaker authoring experience. I’ve grouped into…

Basic HTML5 output from FrameMaker is quite easy and looks surprisingly good. It’s when you want to move beyond the default choices and formatting that you will need to get creative. Such is the case when setting up the navigation panel, or the TOC, in a number of the HTML5 layouts. If your FrameMaker HTML5…

While I love the formatting of my warnings, notes, and cautions in my FrameMaker projects, I don’t love what I currently have to go through to get formatted labeling in the HTML5 output for those projects. This post goes into CSS and HTML5 template topics, so if you don’t like going “under the hood” you…

FrameMaker docs sometimes contain odd color definitions, often the result of importing specific graphic types into the content. Today we discussed strategies for identifying, correcting, and removing these definitions from one or more docs. We also had a general discussion around setting up structured applications for mil-spec (government) structure models, and we discussed options for…

DITA World was a big success, and (with over 5500 registrants) Stefan Gentz and I were certainly worn out after hosting the 3-day event on October 9-11, 2019! We had great sessions on DITA development, including Lightweight DITA and DITA 2.0. We also had lots of information on iiRDS (an Internet of Things standard) and…

Thanks to everyone in my Oct 3, 2019 free office hours session. We had a great lineup of questions from the Tech Comm Tools community, and here’s a recap of what we covered along with a link to the recording: 00:30 Discussion of the (lack of) Object Properties link in the View menu. See my…

A student in my free Intro to FrameMaker 2019 course noticed that the View > Toolbars > Object Properties menu item brings up an interesting toolbar, rather than the Object Properties pod. Here’s a snap of the toolbar that displays using Fm 15.0.4.751: Even more interesting, the toolbar that comes up has a button (circled…

I had a great session with everyone in Thursday’s 9am Pacific office hours session. We didn’t have any RoboHelp users in today’s session, so the majority of topics were FrameMaker. Here’s a quick list of what we discussed. Managing titles in autogenerated FrameMaker files (we used a List of Figures, or LOT in our example)…