Recently I have changed my overall approach. Instead of waiting until a document is nearly finished, I look for errors throughout the process of working on the document. This approach requires that Arbortext Editor’s preferences be set to check spelling as you type.

As you work on a document, watch out for words that have red squiggly lines beneath them. Arbortext uses these lines to highlight possible errors.

When you right-click a word that has been highlighted, a context menu appears with spelling suggestions (if available) and various spell check options, such as Ignore All and Add to Dictionary.

If any problems are found, Arbortext displays a window that lists the errors. I usually find that my document contains a bunch of broken cross references.

Notice the first sentence in the upper part of the window: “Double click the left mouse button on any object in error to position the cursor at the point of error, or to cycle through occurrences of the error.”

This statement is not particularly helpful with respect to broken cross references. What you need to do is double-click the underlined phrase “show ids”. This action causes the IDs and ID References dialog box to appear. From there, look for any rows that have the word “MISSING” in the Element column.

To record a macro, you go to the Tools menu, point to Macros, and click Record New Macro. The dialog box that appears allows you to specify a name, the file where the macro will be stored (more on that in a second), and a description.

For the macro storage location, you need to determine the scope. The default choice enables you to use the macro with any file. The other two choices enable you to use the macro only with the current document, or with all documents of the same type. I haven’t yet felt the need to change the default choice.

Specify the information, click OK, and then perform the actual steps. When you are done, click the Stop Recording button.

To run a macro, place your cursor in the appropriate place and use the Alt+F8 keyboard shortcut to display the list of recorded macros. Select the desired macro and click Run. The macro does its thing.

I recently started working on some SGML files that have large tables. I’m talking really large. I found that the performance of Arbortext Editor slowed considerably whenever I encountered one of these tables.

Then I received a great piece of advice: If you’re not working on tables, collapse them.

You can start by closing all of the tables in your file. Go to the View menu and select Collapse/Expand Divisions. Select the table element and click Collapse.

Now when you need to work on a specific table, expand that table, do whatever you need to do, and collapse it again when you’re done.

Let’s assume that you have an SGML file open and you know that a particular phrase or sentence is already a text entity — but you don’t know the unique name of the text entity. How can you easily figure out the name?

One of my co-workers said that she goes to the View menu and selects Text Entities. The content of the text entity is replaced by a tag that displays the name.

Then I told her my approach. Place your cursor inside the phrase or sentence and choose Entities > Text. The Text Entities dialog box appears with the entity highlighted.

My co-worker said that she liked my approach better. Sweet!

The biggest issue was that I was the single bellybutton to all the documentation. I strived for a collaborative solution. I worked with Wiki’s and set out to install one. Our corporate structure would not allow me to install one. The company had just created one, and they only wanted one in the company culture. I was not sure that I wanted all my documentation out there for all to see. Because I work for a large aerospace company. However, I got over it; it was more important to have collaborative tools rather than my pride. I imported all the docbook information into our Wiki.

The biggest complaint of the wiki was its weak search. I wanted a way for a writer who is authoring in a SGML/XML file, to hit the help button and go to an exact area in the documentation. The Arbortext Editor has the Shift-F1 to present a customized help. I played with it trying to add hyperlinks to those files. With the help of the adepters mailing list and Clay Helberg (a Arbortext guru), he mentioned a few things, one being of which is remapping the Shift-F1 key. The other is how to open a file. So, I used the browse_url function which launches a HTML page, in my case a Wiki page. I needed to add more information in the URL based on the two things: the DTD name and element name. In the Wiki, I am using subpages which are like a collection. All pages will be a subpages grouped in “Structured-Elements” and also “38784″ (the DTD name) followed by the tag name. The tag is found using the ACL functions of oid_name(oid_caret()). The oid_caret is the cursor position and oid_name is the name of the element. So below is the code snippet: I placed it inside my ACL file located at  (<arbortext-home>/custom/editinit) which gets sourced when a document is opened.

When the writers place the cursor inside an element, for example,  <title>, and then does a Shift-F1, the Arbortext Editor will open to a Wiki page by element and DTD name.

That was the easy part, now is the hard part; populating the Wiki with content on the elements. With Mil-Spec DTD’s (some of our work uses them), we have a TDT file (it contains all the element names and attributes with descriptions). My co-worker, Joe, our other Software Engineer, wrote a Perl script to convert each element to a Wiki page. I will import a couple of hundred new Wiki pages here in the next few days.

The final part is adding extra links in these new pages to the established Wiki pages, therefore linking the entire project together.

Arrays

Arrays are special variables with multiple “compartments”. Each compartment holds a value. Arrays consist of names and indexes. ACL has two types of one-dimensional arrays:

Normal arrays are indexed by integers subscripts.

Associative arrays are indexed by arbitrary strings or keys.

Declaring Arrays

Arrays can be defined as local or global. Define them like a variable, ($) name, square brackets, semicolon. Arrays can be set to a dimension such as having ten values, $array[10].  The square brackets [ ] are used to address or retrieve the elements of an array.

Accessing Array

Accessing the keys of an array, use the for loop, as in: for (key in array).
For example, the code below iterates over the two elements of the associative array color twice, once with Associative and once with Normal:

Arbortext Editor Help File

If you are using Arbortext Editor or other products, press F1 or, from the menu, Help >  Help Topics which opens the help file.

When you are reviewing emails from the Adepters mailing lists, the Arbortext User’s Community  (to Join, http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/st/ld/sid=s1_001), you will see a posting that states see help 7550. To view that help page, you type it from the command line.  If the command line is not visible,  turn it on from Tools > Preferences, category Window, and check the Command Line.

Starting a Help File from the Command Line

There are times when you will need to share some information from one of the help files. In order to retrieve the help file number, right click on the page, and get the properties.

Properties on a Help Page

The properties will open and you can obtain and share the help file (help 7550).

Obtaining the Help Number