Adding MadCap Flare and MadCap Lingo to your translation toolkit

MadCap Lingo is MadCap Software’s integrated XML translation solution for your MadCap Flare or MadCap Blaze projects.

Seen on Translation Wire by Scott Bass,

Flare was created by the original designers of RoboHelp. I guess the smart people who came up with RoboHelp back in the 90’s got tired of seeing their brainchild being bought and sold like an old Honda Accord. They finally broke out on their own and put their best ideas into developing Flare.

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I will say that Madcap is one of the only software companies that actually makes the effort to reach out to the translation and localization industry and listen to our experiences about dealing with multilingual authoring and publishing of Help systems and other document formats, and then proceeds to incorporate what they learn into the product. We have personally experienced how well Madcap responds to addressing new functionality and how quickly they move to extend support for new features and languages.

Some of the features we appreciate most about Flare when it comes to translation are…

• Ease of filtering content for use with our current translation memory tools
• Ability to easily identify and manipulate ancillary files such as glossary and table of contents
• Customizable skins and navigation
• Integration with Madcap Lingo—Madcap’s translation memory application
• Integration with Madcap Capture (screen capturing utility) and Mimic (screen action recording)

Microsoft patents in-game guide system

Seen on Gamespot,

Researcher’s 2008 patent for "User-Powered Always Available Contextual Game Help" shows Microsoft is considering an in-game guide similar to that of New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

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According to a copy of the patent application obtained by GameSpot, the technology would allow players who can’t pass challenges to access a guide installed on the console through an in-game user interface. The guide would then analyze the "current context of the game including the encountered challenge," using a system in which "each object in the game is supplied with a tag having a unique ID."

Once identifying information about the challenges and in-game objects is analyzed, the game would then offer possible solutions drawn from a "list of entries" in the guide. Each of those entries would be "relevant to succeeding at the encountered challenge as represented by the received current context of the game."

Using Windows 7’s Problem Steps Recorder to help describe and capture steps as they are made

Windows 7 comes with an interesting little tech support tool.  After seeing this article, Using the Problem Steps Recorder to Diagnose Problems Remotely, I tried this for myself on Windows 7 just to see how it works.

To cite from the article,

Users are never good at explaining what went wrong, making life difficult for the people who need to support them. Fortunately, Windows 7 has a new feature to make debugging easier – even from a distance.

Problem Steps Recorder tool captures key events such as a mouse click, key press or a mouse move, and inserts a description and screen shot. Each action is captured, and described and then zipped. The zip file contains a MHT(compressed Microsoft HTML) document which you can open in Internet Explorer.

For a technical writer or a development team, this would be fantastic feature addition if we could use this to help create rough procedural screen-by-screen quick start graphical guides. Create rough-cut pictorial guides in seconds simply by recording. As a writer, all you would need to do, then would be to crop and embellish the generated content, rearrange steps or crop images as required.

I really can see this as a great writing assistance tool to a small tech writing or tech support team. A fantastic time saver and no more excuses from SME’s about problems drafting rough procedures screen by screen.

Using MadCap Flare and MadCap Blaze for high quality print outputs

There’s an article titled Generating Quality Print Output from MadCap Flare or Blaze on Writers UA by Matthew Ellison, a MadCap Flare Certified Instructor.

Although it was written based on the most recent version of Flare/Blaze at this point in time, Flare 5 and Blaze 2, all of it is just as applicable if you are using Flare 4/Blaze 1. You’ll learn to work with page layouts, customize chapter headings, add chapter and list numbering and use conditions effectively for single-sourcing your documentation.

It provides guidelines that will help you leverage these two versatile and highly popular XML-based publishing solutions to generate print based outputs such as Microsoft XML Paper Specification, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe PDF, and Microsoft Word.

As a supplement to MadCap Flare and MadCap Blaze’s already in-depth help documentation, the article makes a good refresher and quick start to print output with Flare and Blaze. Its not as challenging when you’ve gotten the hang of the workflow, and pretty soon you’ll find opportunities to generate on your own tens of customized print targets for different audiences (books for tech support, executives, marketing, developer APIs) and purposes and scenarios (troubleshooting, quick start guides, train the trainer notes, style guides, etc) .

The article includes links back to the appropriate topics in the Flare/Blaze documentation for you to delve deeper into the content, if you need to see more examples.

Clean up Word documents before importing with Clean Up Text utility

Found this useful little Word utility that helps you clean up Word documents that have been poorly formatted before you import them into your Flare projects as additional topics or as a new project.

Its a very small download and loads into word as a DOT (Word template) file with macros. You can view the screenshot on the website.

See http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Clean_Up_Text.htm

Its free and works well.