Archive for the ‘ePublisher’ Category

Free Webinar: Controlling help-specific features in WebWorks ePublisher Pro

Posted on: January 18th, 2008

Do you work with Frame and use the EDDs? Want to learn how to configure one for use with ePublisher as a way to control help specific features?

Then we recommend that you sign up for Martin Smith’s upcoming webinar and find out how he did it.

Here’s Martin’s description of his webinar.


I will be hosting a free Webinar on January 31st that describes how to control help-specific features in WebWorks ePublisher Pro using a

structured FrameMaker document based on a minimalist EDD.


This Webinar is based in part on a successful presentation that I gave at the WebWorks RoundUp 2007 conference in Austin.


As anyone who has used ePublisher knows, WebWorks is a great single-source authoring tool. However, implementing help-specific features (such as pop-ups, drop-downs, and custom pages) and controlling topic / mid-topic breaks requires a tremendous number of styles, or

time spent post-processing the help system.


What is needed is a way to select help-specific features within the FrameMaker source files independent of the formatting applied to the

text. I specialize in developing minimalist EDDs for FrameMaker that format the text using context-based style rules. The EDD independently

assigns paragraph and character style names to the text, solely for the benefit of WebWorks. The author can turn any section into a topic,

mid-topic, drop-down, or pop-up simply by selecting an attribute value. The EDD automatically assigns the paragraph styles to the section

heading and all of its descendents necessary to implement the desired help feature in the corresponding WebWorks ePublisher project.


Mark your calendar for 11:00 am EST; 8:00 am PST (10:00am CT,  11:00am ET) on January 31st if you would like to see a live demonstration of this help authoring technique in action.


To register, click here to access the enrollment page and click “Enroll” to the right of the event.

WebWorks CEO and Founder, Tony McDow, described Martin’s EDD as one of the cleanest and most
“ePublisher comprehensive” EDDs he has seen and believes it worth
examining if you are considering EDD work for your own documentation.

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7 things you must know about ePublisher Platform

Posted on: November 14th, 2007

When you become intimately involved with a product it’s often difficult to step back and distill its value into just a few simple direct phrases. Often it needs someone from outside to grasp what you have been saying and capture it.

RoundUp attendee Anne Gentle did just that on her blog. And with her permission here’s her

7 things you must know about ePublisher Platform.

1. Content is king. Your source content can be Word, Frame, or DITA. You can even convert other formats such as RoboHelp to Word or Frame and go from there.

2. Formats are separate from content and can be customized.

3. Combining content is allowed and even encouraged. Mixed content is just fine.

4. There are great demos (over an hour’s worth) on the Quadralay web site.

5. ePublisher has an extendable XML adapter. This extensibility means that no matter what XML you’re putting in, ePublisher can be extended to understand it.

6. You can automate the dickens out of your output build processes and integrate with development’s version control systems and build with the Auto-mapper.

7. The WebWorks Wiki (uses MoinMoin engine if you’re wondering) has lots of information and they encourage people to contribute to it.

Thanks Ann – we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.