How to style type for beautiful headlines in topics and articles

Typechart,  lets you preview a popular fonts used for headlines and style them correctly with letter spacing and line-spacing adjustments for each typeface. After that, you can ‘grab’ the style attributes for your own CSS. Good when you are desigining for any online or print single-sourcing project.

 

Typetester, is another online utility that lets you set and compare a variety of style attributes for different fonts and see how they appear online, as paragraphs.

 

2 articles on beautiful typography with CSS for your documentation projects

Have you been tweaking with padding, font-sizes, letter-spacing and line heights (tracking) on your projects?

Consider these 2 articles on styling with beautiful typography with CSS. Consider the examples and tips as you design your next style sheet for MadCap Blaze or MadCap Flare books, manuals or online projects.

If you can learn the why’s and hows to set type correctly,  with the right CSS attributes, you can give your single-sourcing projects a professional finish and polish that you would not normally get.

You’ll get acquainted with terms like ascenders and descenders, letter-spacing and line-heights and aesthetic reasons behind some of these choices by professionals.

10 Examples of Beautiful CSS Typography and How They Did It

Five Simple Steps to Beautiful Typography by Mark Boulton a UK based designer currently working closely on making major usability improvements for the next version of the as yet unreleased version of the popular open source content management system, Drupal 7.

Learning curves of products and creating passionate users

Do you want to create passionate users of a product or service?

There is an interesting post on creating passionate users by the creator of Drupal , Dries Buytaert. Its Buytaert’s take on how passionate users are cultivated in an open source project like Drupal.

Experts write documentation

For example, if you can start contributing to documentation on an open source project like Drupal, you lie somewhere on the realm of ‘i kick ass’ threshold. In contrast, most users who are just beginning or in the ‘I suck’ bar, tend to work on installations, installing themes and simply creating basic nodes (topics in help authoring terms) and blocks (a more dynamic version of snippets).

We contribute on forums, help users, post arcane tips and solutions, dig deep into the product internals for hacks, shortcuts, start blogs on them, contribute on tutorials.  Evangelizer, advocator and recruiter.

Experts vs beginners

To some extent when you become good at a tool, and the product becomes more popular, the desire is to keep requesting for new product features. However, at some point, the product’s feature to learnability ratio reaches a state where addition of more features become a barrier to new user adoption.

An interesting observation.

A measure of passion

The post includes lots of colourful illustrated line graphs rated on different levels of ‘i suck’ to ‘i kick ass’ – so the analysis is rather light but quick and easy to understand. Probably not something we see in technical documentation or business software.

As rich and robust tools like MadCap Flare mature and deepen with time, and greater variety of customers use it, balancing features, usability and the long time ‘health’ of the product will become important.

As a product becomes more popular, the pressure to give in to user requests will grow. Diversity comes with more diverse requests.

Even popular off the shelf tools you use, Adobe PhotoShop and AutoCAD, and Microsoft Word are products which are close to a decade old in an industry where product cycles are becoming shorter and shorter.

Ignore your most vocal of customers. Avoid featuritis.

In the larger scheme of things this isn’t always a bad thing.

The popular, very readable, short book, Getting Real readable online, by Ruby On Rails pioners,  37signals alludes to this, in a take, I presume on similar more established, project management tools like Microsoft Project. Stay focused, simple.

Or at least, allow extension points to be built in to keep products usable for ‘new adopters’ while retaining its deep functionality for ‘early but passionate adopters’.

I should have made my point in this post shorter. Alas.

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."