Inspired by the popular “Monster Garage” television show on the Discovery Channel, today Single-Sourcing Solutions is launching a new webinar series: “Arbortext Monster Garage.” On the TV show, a team of people with mechanical, fabricating, or modifying expertise gathers together to modify a vehicle into a “monster machine.” In our new webinar series, we’re gathering people from [...]
Checking a document for spelling errors is not one of my favorite tasks. I usually receive a lot of false hits, thanks to the nature of the technical manuals in my current job. For example, some manuals include a long series of part numbers that would never appear in the official dictionary used by the [...]
Arbortext Editor has a nice feature that enables you to check a document for various types of errors. To use this feature, go to the Tools menu and click Check Completeness. If any problems are found, Arbortext displays a window that lists the errors. I usually find that my document contains a bunch of broken [...]
As I was glancing through the Arbortext Editor menus not long ago, I came across the macro feature. Where I work, we are always looking for ways to do things more efficiently, so I decided to check out this tool. To record a macro, you go to the Tools menu, point to Macros, and click [...]
In an earlier post, Douglas Wade reviewed the basics of collapsing and expanding in Arbortext Editor. I would like to add a few thoughts about this feature as it relates to tables. I recently started working on some SGML files that have large tables. I’m talking really large. I found that the performance of [...]
In Arbortext Editor, a text entity is a named piece of content. For example, you could create a text entity called Product Name with the content Widget Analyzer 2010. Text entities help you to achieve consistency both within and across documents. Simple enough, right? Let’s assume that you have an SGML file open and you [...]
Arbortext has a really great help system. A writer or developer should be using it often. For me, I have placed a shortcut on my desktop. The help file is in the format of Microsoft compiled help (extension .chm). It is located in <arbortext-installation>/help folder and is called help.chm. Double-click to launch the file. If you [...]
View and Collapse Elements In Arbortext Editor, you can view or collapse (or hide) elements and their content to make it easier to navigate through your document. Each parent element will display a graphic: a minus graphic when the content is expanded. a plus graphic when the content is collapsed. Notice: next to sect1 element [...]
It is helpful to search for text inside an element instead of searching through the entire manual. For example, to find a literal hyphen (used for Not Illustrated in MIL-STD-38807, Ideally, it should be added to the attribute “notshown”) in the element <ipbfigindex>, do the following: Find > Find/Replace and in the Find What: text [...]
Setup The sweep arrow tail has been created as a brush. I have a file already created in the file called, “Adobe Illustrator Startup RGB.ai”, which contains the brush. Download it and open the folder “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Illustrator 10\Plug-ins” (or where the application was installed). Rename the existing file “Adobe Illustrator Startup_RGB.ai” to anything you like [...]