Post by thread:[EE]: Desktop publishing for training manuals

I'm not sure it's even called desktop publishing anymore. :-) MS PowerPoint is great when you need to gee whiz a customer or VC but weak for training manuals. In a past life many years ago I used Micrografx Designer and it worked pretty well. Since then Micrografx has become igrafx and the Designer product went to Corel. Before I spend a lot of time looking for old disks to upgrade I wondered: - are others using Corel Designer and if so how do you like it? - what other tools are people using to create 8.5x11 portrait mode manuals with TOC and Index? thanks chuckc ____________________________________________

On Friday 12 November 2004 07:29 pm, Charles Craft wrote: > - what other tools are people using to create 8.5x11 portrait mode > manuals with TOC and Index? http://www.openoffice.org prints to PDF... quite readable even under Adobe Reader 3. gimp may prove useful to create graphics. If using windows... then as old as "Print Artist" by Sierra is (probably $5.00 in bargain bins), it holds a lot of clipart and you can morph text too. Print Artist is geared more towards birthday cards, signs, banners, but it was originally created by AutoCad ;-) ____________________________________________

In a message dated 11/12/04 10:33:36 PM Eastern Standard Time, spam_OUTchuckseaTakeThisOuTmindspring.com writes: {Quote hidden}> I'm not sure it's even called desktop publishing anymore. :-) > > MS PowerPoint is great when you need to gee whiz a customer or VC but weak > for training manuals. > In a past life many years ago I used Micrografx Designer and it worked > pretty well. > > Since then Micrografx has become igrafx and the Designer product went to > Corel. > > Before I spend a lot of time looking for old disks to upgrade I wondered: > > - are others using Corel Designer and if so how do you like it? > > - what other tools are people using to create 8.5x11 portrait mode manuals > with TOC and Index? > > > thanks > chuckc > How about Adobe Acrobat? With it you can create pretty much anything and make .PDF files for electronic manuals. Just a thought. Randy ____________________________________________

At 10:29 PM 11/12/2004 -0500, you wrote: {Quote hidden}>I'm not sure it's even called desktop publishing anymore. :-) > >MS PowerPoint is great when you need to gee whiz a customer or VC but weak >for training manuals. >In a past life many years ago I used Micrografx Designer and it worked >pretty well. > >Since then Micrografx has become igrafx and the Designer product went to >Corel. > >Before I spend a lot of time looking for old disks to upgrade I wondered: > > - are others using Corel Designer and if so how do you like it? > > - what other tools are people using to create 8.5x11 portrait mode > manuals with TOC and Index? > > >thanks >chuckc I like Adobe InDesign. Best regards, Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" .....speffKILLspam@spam@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com ____________________________________________

I use LaTeX but it takes a few minutes to learn and isn't WYSIWYG. Output is top-notch. Charles Craft wrote: {Quote hidden}> I'm not sure it's even called desktop publishing anymore. :-) > > MS PowerPoint is great when you need to gee whiz a customer or VC but weak for training manuals. > In a past life many years ago I used Micrografx Designer and it worked pretty well. > > Since then Micrografx has become igrafx and the Designer product went to Corel. > > Before I spend a lot of time looking for old disks to upgrade I wondered: > > - are others using Corel Designer and if so how do you like it? > > - what other tools are people using to create 8.5x11 portrait mode manuals with TOC and Index? > > > thanks > chuckc > > > > ______________________________________________

In my first reply to this thread I failed to mention that Corel has a free 30 day full-feature demo of Ventura 10 available on their web site. You can also purchase the older version 8 at very reasonable prices from online sites. I have used Framemaker, Quark Express, InDesign, Pagemaker, and about a dozen other desktop publishing programs. My favorite is Corel Ventura 10. Try the demo. You have 30 days to examine it for free. If you take the time to learn it, I think you will find that it is excellent for producing manuals and books and all other kinds of documents. If you have any other Corel products you can easily add them to the toolbar. I use Corel Photopaint a lot, and all I have to do is right-click on a photo or bitmap in any document to bring up Photopaint to edit the bitmap. As with any full-feature program, there is a learning curve, especially if you are interested in some of the more esoteric features. That said, however, I found Ventura easier to learn than many of the other products. It has a large number of import filters, so you can import files created in wordprocessors with no problem. It has built-in options for producing PDF and HTML output. To say I like it is an understatement. Fr. Tom McGahee {Quote hidden}> I use Corel Ventura 10, which has special features that make it good for > producing larger documents like manuals and books. I have had access over > the years to several desktop publishing and word processors, but Ventura > is > my favorite. Does TOC and Index and Cross Referencing. Has excellent > control > over style sheets and the like. They also have a database publisher > program > that converts raw database info into a Ventura file for publication. > > Fr. Tom Mcgahee ____________________________________________

> I have used Framemaker, Quark Express, InDesign, Pagemaker, and about a > dozen other desktop publishing programs. My favorite is Corel Ventura 10. I generally use Microsoft Word (which I have anyway) for such things. What is it that you are missing in Word that these publishing programs provide? The only feature that I'm missing (or that I know of that I'm missing :) is flow of text between multiple text boxes, and most of the time I can work around this somehow. Gerhard ____________________________________________

I've been in the professional print trade for some fifteen years, and have probably dealt with just about every package out there. I've done tech. docs and training manuals, some of them over 1000 pages and in different languages. I would agree that Ventura is a darling when it comes to long technical document publishing. FrameMaker and Indesign are close contenders. Personally, I find Quark Xpress to be over-rated and over-priced, the latest release (big $$) being little more than a patch. If you are going to be using colour, or working with a "real" print shop... I would warn you that Word is often the cause of many tears (and perhaps bloodshed). Although a very powerful word-processer, and excellent for writing/tagging text, Word NOT a layout program of any merit. Support for professional colour, imposition, and trapping are lacking, text kerning/tracking is poor and clumsy, and it has an awful habit of reformatting a document when opened on any other machine. Updating graphics can become a real nightmare too. If you decided to use Word for layout, I'd highly recommend handing PDF's to your printer along with the native files. There are a lot of cheapo "Publishing" packages on the market that are great for the odd business card, invitation etc., and they are attractive: 10 zillion free fonts, and more clip-art than you'll ever need - I'd stay away, they are basically toys. yours in print ;) Ian {Original Message removed}

Ian's comments made me realize that there are really three, very different, categories of products out there (well, maybe 4 if you include specialized packages like DocMaker). On the one end, there are document preparation systems like LaTeX and groff. These are good for preparing content and organization and managing updates. They are also easy to automate. They are fairly poor at getting the layout exactly right. These things are really great at collecting input from a number of sources and assembling them in a consistent way. At the other end are desktop publishing systems that are great at getting things to look exactly the way you want and horrid at getting the content and organization. In the middle are word processing packages that do a half-assed job at both. 90% of the time, they do a good enough job, though, and so they really do most of the heavy lifting. If you have a big job and care about content and organization, move to the doc preparation systems. If your focus is on appearance, go to the publishing apps. If you want both, you prepare your content in a pure text form and import it into FrameMaker, and prepare to spend a whole lot of time doing it. There actually is a big advantage to the last way. You can have engineers prepare the content in plain ascii text. By ripping Word out of their hands they won't be able to play at being artists and can concentrate on the content. Then you can hire an artist to do the actual layout. --McD ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Hooper" <noisyKILLspamrogers.com> Subject: Re: [EE]: Desktop publishing for training manuals ____________________________________________

Lots of great feedback/discussion so far (on what can be a dry subject). :-) I'm building reseller and end user training courses for a 1U network management appliance. Plenty of screen shots from the Java GUI in a browser. Some theory diagrams on proxying SNMP, HTTP and UDP. What I need to end up with is a set of slides that I can send to a LCD projector when doing training. And a student handbook with the same slides and accompanying text notes. And the really sweet piece to add would be instuctor notes for clarification of topics. MS PowerPoint does OK with most it by creating slides with the graphic and using the Notes page area for the text. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO BECOME A VISUAL BASIC PROGRAMMER TO CREATE DOCUMENTS!!!! (slam fist on desktop to get the audio that goes along with above statement) :-) 1. The Table of Contents generator in PowerPoint is a macro? Not as configurable as TOC in MS Word. 2. Don't think I can create an Index in PowerPoint. 3. Really $%#$^#$%$ me off that I can't reference the slide title in the Notes page master header. There should be a way of sticking fields into PowerPoint like Word does. 4. PowerPoint doesn't support layers which would help with having different notes printed. Also doesn't support multiple page/slide Masters which would be nice. Don't need any fancy setup stuff for a professional printer since we'll pump them out of a laser printer as needed. {Original Message removed}

OpenOffice suits my own need very well. Tip: Do learn to use templates and the stylist and you will never use MSWord again... OK, I have not used MS products for years, I also used Pagemaker. Never needed them again when first Staroffice5, then Openoffice came about, and from what i have read it is now in most cases superior to MSOffice, even include vector drawing program, and handle large complex documents better. PDF generation is really good for "normal" use. http://www.openoffice.org For the same program, but with larger dictionary, some extras and a paper book, go buy StarOffice from SUN. For more professional document direct produciton postscript quality, color handling etc, tnan any *Office, google up on Scribus. Homepage: http://www.scribus.org.uk/ Myself have only played with an earlier version, but I read even some magazies are using it today. For image editing: GIMP. /Morgan -- Morgan Olsson, Kivik, Sweden ____________________________________________

At 08:21 AM 16/11/2004 +0100, you wrote: > >OpenOffice suits my own need very well. Tip: Do learn to use templates and the stylist and you will never use MSWord again... OK, I have not used MS products for years, I also used Pagemaker. >Never needed them again when first Staroffice5, then Openoffice came about, and from what i have read it is now in ...... Hi Quick query; Many years ago there was a dos text editor called e.com. The really neat thing about this program was that it allowed one to do block cut/copy/paste. Ever since then I've only seen progs that pull up the rest of the line when copying/cutting. The feature was really neat for code writing since it made it easy to paste a column of say "equ 0x ; " anywhere on the page without screwing up the other text. I typed this up using carrige returns just to demostrate a copy and pasted block. eg; pasted block; ed this up us ge returns ju trate a copy d block. So my question is if anyone is aware of a similar text editor without me having to test them all. Regards Roland Jollivet ____________________________________________

Roland wrote: {Quote hidden}>At 08:21 AM 16/11/2004 +0100, you wrote: > > >>OpenOffice suits my own need very well. Tip: Do learn to use templates >> >> >and the stylist and you will never use MSWord again... OK, I have not used >MS products for years, I also used Pagemaker. > > >>Never needed them again when first Staroffice5, then Openoffice came >> >> >about, and from what i have read it is now in ...... > >Hi > >Quick query; > >Many years ago there was a dos text editor called e.com. The really neat >thing about this program was that it allowed >one to do block cut/copy/paste. Ever since then I've only seen progs that >pull up the rest of the line when copying/cutting. >The feature was really neat for code writing since it made it easy to paste >a column of say "equ 0x ; " anywhere >on the page without screwing up the other text. > >I typed this up using >carrige returns just to >demostrate a copy and >pasted block. > >eg; pasted block; ed this up us > ge returns ju > trate a copy > d block. > >So my question is if anyone is aware of a similar text editor without me >having to test them all. > IIRC, Ultra-Edit can do this. It's called "column mode". http://www.ultraedit.com David... -- ___________________________________________ David Duffy Audio Visual Devices P/L U8, 9-11 Trade St, Cleveland 4163 Australia Ph: +61 7 38210362 Fax: +61 7 38210281 New Web: http://www.audiovisualdevices.com.au ___________________________________________ ____________________________________________

On Tuesday 16 November 2004 01:27 am, David Duffy wrote: {Quote hidden}> Roland wrote: > >Quick query; > >Many years ago there was a dos text editor called e.com. The really neat > >thing about this program was that it allowed > >one to do block cut/copy/paste. Ever since then I've only seen progs that > >pull up the rest of the line when copying/cutting. > >The feature was really neat for code writing since it made it easy to > > paste a column of say "equ 0x ; " anywhere > >on the page without screwing up the other text. > > > >I typed this up using > >carrige returns just to > >demostrate a copy and > >pasted block. > > > >eg; pasted block; ed this up us > > ge returns ju > > trate a copy > > d block. > > > >So my question is if anyone is aware of a similar text editor without me > >having to test them all. > > IIRC, Ultra-Edit can do this. It's called "column mode". > http://www.ultraedit.com > David... ...and if you are running linux with the KDE desktop, it's builtin to kWrite as "Edit->blockmode". Kwrite is sort of like windows "notepad on steroids" so it makes a great text and/or source-code editor. ____________________________________________

> The really neat thing about this program was that it allowed > one to do block cut/copy/paste. EMACS has "rectangle mode" that does this. EMACS *probably* has every feature anyone could ever want. Finding those features, figuring out how they work, adapting them to your particular problem, and updating versions may all be a bit ... trying. EMACS is an interesting microcosm of everything that is good and bad about open source, I think... BillW ____________________________________________

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:37:58, Roland <.....jemelectricKILLspam.....mweb.co.za> wrote: > Many years ago there was a dos text editor called e.com. The really neat > thing about this program was that it allowed > one to do block cut/copy/paste. Ever since then I've only seen progs that > pull up the rest of the line when copying/cutting. > The feature was really neat for code writing since it made it easy to paste > a column of say "equ 0x ; " anywhere > on the page without screwing up the other text. TextPad (http://www.textpad.com) also has this feature. In TextPad it is called "Block Select Mode." You can download a fully functional demo version from their website. Bradley ____________________________________________

I used VEDIT way back in the CPM days and still use it today under Windows. It also has a block cut/paste mode. It is a very powerful editor that I drag out whenever I have something special to do. It has a very complete and powerful macro language built in. Unfortunately, they changed that from a TECO like language that I knew and loved into something a lot wordier that I have to look up every time I use it. Bob Ammerman RAm Systems {Original Message removed}

----- Original Message ----- From: "William Chops Westfield" <EraseMEwestfwspam_OUTTakeThisOuTmac.com> Subject: Re: [EE]: Desktop publishing for training manuals > EMACS *probably* has every feature anyone could ever want. and quite a few nobody could possibly want! I mean, the Coptic calendar? How handy is that. And it's always useful to know when the next tzolkin is. But really, my favorite feature is that it is available on every operating system known to man. It's hard learning a full-featured editor, and it's a huge win to be able to keep the same editor migrating from RSX to VMS to VM/CMS, to OS/2, to Windoze to Linux, and on and on and on ... --McD ____________________________________________

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 14:34:13 -0800, William Chops Westfield <@spam@westfwKILLspammac.com> wrote: > > The really neat thing about this program was that it allowed > > one to do block cut/copy/paste. > > EMACS has "rectangle mode" that does this. EMACS *probably* has every > feature > anyone could ever want. And of course, vim has this as well. (Visual block mode) Alex ____________________________________________