Building New Stuff
January 19th, 2010 by jwilesOne of the things that is challenging for me as a developer is staying on target with regard to ePublisher development when there are so many glittery web-technologies to play with. For example, I have have long yearned for a true AutoMap server which would allow for the Administration of ePublisher/AutmoMap configuration and execution over a web (http) connection. Recently I put together a Google Docs input adapter with the intention of demonstrating the capabilities of the ePublisher architecture. When it comes to inputs, I’ve got far more ideas than I have time to implement.
__possible__: Google Docs in ePublisher
November 5th, 2009 by jwilesHere is a screen-cast of the GoogleDocs input adapter that we demoed at RoundUp 2009. A couple of caveats:
- This is not currently available and there are no definite plans for making this a part of any ePublisher release. That largely depends on user interest (your interest).
- The implementation is a demo. As such, there are aspects which will needs require further development.
- This is my first-ish screen-recording.
ru2k9
October 20th, 2009 by jwilesI had meant to blog about coming to RoundUp last week…and then I didn’t. So, for those of us who are here anyway, wow! What a good conference. In the interests of disclosure I will good ahead and let you know that I’m going to gush a little. Yesterday gets my vote for the all-time best RoundUp day ever. The panels (the one I saw:)) were fluid, effective, informative.
Boot Camp
The Boot Camp room, where I was set up for all but one panel, was good. I demoed a transformer server that we used as a teaching tool and this seemed to go really well. The main purpose of the tool is to provide an online XSL Transform to evaluate XPath, try out transformation scenarios; basically, play with XSL right away without and run-time set up.
Case Studies and Presentation
The case studies and presentations have been really good. That’s admittedly a tepid comment, given that it uses “really” qualifier. But I am sincere. In the case of both morning presentations, Stewart Mader and Tom Johnson, both gave effective presentations…and I disagreed with a lot of their ideas. This is hardly surprising, given that I find nearly all opinions which are not my own, at least minorly offensive in some way. I also feel that precisely because I disagreed with their opinions so strongly (at least in Tom’s case), the presentations were highly effective. Perhaps at another time I will blog about what chaffed.
**POSTSCRIPT-ish** OK, I’ve now talked to three different people about my strong disagreements and I’m convinced that this is my own trip. Ben made the point that when I questioned Tom today after the session, it was as if I felt, he were talking directly to me. Touched a nerve. Anyway, great presentation Tom, for real.
Booze Cruise
So at the end of the magical first day, we had a cruise out on Ladybird Lake (formerly known as Town Lake (when did that happen? (i’m writing recursive asides, i’m such a programming nerd!!))). The weather was that one-of- two days-of-perfect-72-degree-weather-a-year in Austin. At the tail end of it, in the sun setting sky, the bats came spewing out of the Congress Avenue bridge just as the boat took our happy party beneath it. Sweetness.
Manyana
Some great stuff has turned up at RoundUp this year. I’m a little jealous of the folks like Mary Anthony and Liz Keene and Jae Evans, with whom I did a panel on Monday, when I hear about all of the cool stuff they’re doing with ePublisher. It may seem that I’m blowing smoke up my own or our collective company’s wazoo, but the fact is, I love to tinker and when ePublisher is at its best, it’s like a muscle car that you tinker with and that’s what these folks are doing. Tomorrow some of the attendees will get to showcase some of what they’ve done while here. Also, we have a neat demo waiting in the wings that I’ll blog about more at a later time.
And at a little after noon tomorrow, it’s over, quick as it started, with scarcely a ripple showing in the busy downtown Austin bustle, with a release bearing down, and with a defiant and lingering joy or buzz or both.
ePublisher Feed Reader
October 7th, 2009 by jwilesShortly after the release of 2009.2, and after some cooperative discussion here on ways that we might improve ePublisher moving forward, I started work on a Feed Reader for the ePublisher Start Page. This isn’t that ground-breaking as a Feed Reader seems to be fairly commonplace on a start or splash page. The first iteration simply listed the feed items and allowed you to view the entry in your default browser.
This was good progress, but we wanted to see if we could open the blog entries directly in ePublisher, as is the case in Visual Studio. This turned out to be not too difficult to implement. I think it’s cool that a fairly minor augmentation could change the way I think about ePublisher. We’ve always had the ability to view HTML in ePublisher, though the only current place that we use this capability is in the Preview. Opening up ePublisher to allow for browsing the web at-large caused a small cascade of ideas, which I will mention in a later post.
I’m including a couple of screen captures. I am completely to blame for the colors, whether you like them or you don’t. Thoughts?
Start Page with feed reader
Feed link open in ePublisher Pro
2-Celled Note Table
January 22nd, 2009 by jwilesSomeone asked me about this at RoundUp a few months ago, and I’m just now getting around to publishing it. I’ve just posted a tip for creating a two-celled note style table for a given paragraph style on the WebWorks wiki.
The implementation uses the wwtransform:super resolver. We are working to make this the blessed way to do overrides in ePublisher. We are working on formalizing the implementation for the 2009.1 release.
Enjoy and please report any problems.
Frame 7 to Frame 8 problem
December 12th, 2008 by jwilesWe have discovered a kind of a nasty problem which occurs when you bring FrameMaker 7 documents created in some non-English locale, into FrameMaker 8. This problem affects any text that is inserted into the FrameMaker 7 dialogs, such as the Paragraph Designer or the Marker dialog, under the non-English locale. When the docs are pulled into FrameMaker 8 on an English system all of the content is converted to Unicode. However, all of the text from the dialogs is not converted. This means that things like the Index and the Paragarph style names are rendered as garbage characters (or probably more correctly, the raw bytes rendered as FrameRoman encoding).
Page Template Preview Utility
October 15th, 2008 by jwilesAs promised at RoundUp, I have posted a wiki article on the Page Template Preview utility. It lacks a number of things, such as good design, a clearly defined objective, among others. However, it was fun to write and I hope that it might be useful to anyone who may be trying to unravel Page templates.
ePublisher 2008.2 Eclipse Help Article
July 7th, 2008 by jwilesThe 2008.2 Release of the ePublisher Platform went live today. This release includes the Eclipse Help Format. I have just posted a wiki page which documents the items which are peculiar to the Eclipse Help format.
ePublisher 2008.1 and wiki articles
March 31st, 2008 by jwilesI posted two new wiki articles. The first is a general outline of ePublisher URI Resolvers. The second is documentation for wwtransform:super, a cool new URI available in the 2008.1 runtime.
ePublisher 2008.1 is here. Happy Q2.
Publishing Content From the WebWorks Wiki
January 11th, 2008 by jwilesOne of the more interesting aspects of the ePublisher 9.3 Release is the introduction of the Xml Adapter. By default, this Adapter allows users to generate output from DITA source documents. However, perhaps more significantly, it carries with it the ability to configure ePublisher to accept ANY input source.
To demonstrate this functionality, during RoundUp 2007, we showed the Xml Adapter publishing content from the WebWorks Wiki to WebWorks Help 5.0. It was our intention at that time to make this project available online. With this objective in mind, I’ve added a page in the RoundUp section of the WebWorks Wiki. This page includes the project I used to publish content during the Day 2 Keynote. It also includes instructions for modifying which WebWorks Wiki content is included in the project. This effectively gives you the ability to create your own WebWorks Help 5.0 help system, or any other ePublisher supported output Format, including ones you have developed, using content from the WebWorks Wiki.
In the coming weeks, I plan to publish a tutorial on developing a custom Xml Adapter from scratch. Stay tuned.