Unofficial Author-it wiki

Hamish Blunck, a fellow Australian Author-it user, has set up an unofficial Author-it wiki where he and others are documenting Author-it tips and tricks, linking to some good stuff on the Author-it User Group, and generally providing an unofficial supplement to the official Author-it Help and Knowledge Centre.

You can access the wiki here: http://aitwiki.hamishblunck.com/tiki-index.php To post, edit, etc. you’ll need to register.

From Hamish’s original notification:

One of the strengths of the Author-it is the help and support that members of this list provide to each other. But it occurred to me a lot of this useful information is lost and buried in the mountain messages and not captured anywhere. I also thought that it would be useful to have a repository of this great information. I encourage you to add your tips and tricks, your how-to’s, or if you find a great post about Author-it on the web, link to it. Or if you ask a question on the list and you get a useful reply or solution, add it to the wiki.

Author-it: Importing Word 2007 DOCX files

Author-it 5.3 (and earlier) only has an option for importing Word 2003 (DOC) files. It appears that you can’t import Word 2007 files as there’s no DOCX option listed for the file type and any DOCX files in your import directory don’t show.

You have two options:

• Save your Word 2007 DOCX file as a Word 2003 DOC file and import that
• Use the workaround below to import the DOCX file.

Workaround

1. Go to the directory where the DOCX file you want to import is stored. Copy the file name and extension (e.g. filename.docx).
2. Go through the normal steps to import a Word document (Import tab > Word).
3. When you get to the directory where you have to chose the Word file, you won’t see the DOCX file listed so you can’t select it. Instead, paste the copied file name + extension into the File name field, then click Open.

Your DOCX file should import successfully!

(Thanks to Char James-Tanny who provided this workaround; this workaround is also published on Hamish Blunck’s unofficial Author-it Wiki)

Presentation: Customizing HTML Outputs from Author-it

I delivered this presentation at the annual WritersUA Conference in Palm Springs in 2006.

Be aware that Author-it software has been updated several times since 2004 so some of the techniques shown in this presentation, which applied to v4.x, may not be relevant now.

All accompanying handouts are available from the CyberText website.

The focus of this presentation was on:

• how the various Author-it pieces fit together and what you need to make it all work
• how to modify the default HTML templates for HTML-based Help and websites
• how to set up Author-it to produce HTML newsletters
• how to set up Author-it to produce HTML-based slide presentations

[Links last checked April 2009]

Presentation: Time-saving Techniques Using Author-it

I delivered this presentation at the annual WritersUA Conference in Las Vegas in 2005. Be aware that Author-it software has been updated several times since 2005 so some of the techniques shown in this presentation, which applied to v4.x, may not be relevant now.

All accompanying handouts are available from the CyberText website.

The focus of this presentation was on how to:

• create, assign, manage, and use Author-it variables
• use system variables to add ‘feedback loops’ for online content
• create, manage, and use embedded and reusable content
• use release states to save time for reviewers
• use release states to create “What’s New” and “What’s Updated” topics

[Links last checked April 2009]

Presentation: Author-it Tips and Tricks

This presentation was a collaborative one with the other inaugural Author-it Certified Consultant, Char James-Tanny. We jointly delivered this presentation at the 51st STC Annual Conference in Baltimore in 2004. Be aware that Author-it software has been updated several times since 2004 so some of the techniques shown in this presentation, which applied to v4.x, may not be relevant now.

All accompanying handouts are available from the CyberText website.

[Links last checked April 2009]

Author-it’s Xtend gets its first patent

Last year I started using Author-it’s Xtend, an add-on to Author-it, and have been very impressed with its capabilities.

Earlier this week, Author-it Software Corporation announced that they had received approval for their patent for Xtend from the New Zealand Patent and Trademark office — the first of many, they hope.

Congratulations Paul and the Author-it team!

Author-it: Variants and searching

If you’re delving into Author-it 5.1 or later, be aware that child variants don’t show in the Quick Search folders — only the parent objects are listed. And because the Quick Search folder view looks quite similar to the main Author-it window, it’s easy to think you’ve lost your variants, when you haven’t.

Also, when you right-click on a parent object in the Quick Search results and select Show Relationships, you’ll see the child variants listed in the top section, but double-clicking won’t open them and right-clicking and selecting Locate will give you an error message “Could not locate object!”.

Solution:

Close or minimise the Quick Search window and you’ll see your variants in their folders again.

Author-it: Publishing to Word on Vista

If you’re using Vista AND you keep your Author-it Data files separate from the Author-it Program Files, you should never see the error below and so can ignore the rest of this post.

However, if you have your Author-it ..\Data\Templates\.. or Publishing folder on your C:\Program Files\.. drive in Vista, you may get a message that you can’t publish to Word because the file is full, write-protected etc.

The reason you get the error is that Vista’s security prevents you from writing to C:\Program Files. My understanding is that you get the error message because Author-it wants to create the RTF in the ..\Data\Templates\.. folder first, before creating the Word document in the Publishing folder.

How to prevent it? Well, you have a couple of options:

1. Move your ..\Data\.. and ..\Publishing\.. folders out of C:\Program Files\.. to a less secure location. You’ll probably have to reassign your paths in Author-it if you do that.
2. Assign Write permissions to the user (go to the Program Files folder, drill down to the Author-it Templates [and/or Publishing] folder, right-click on it and select Properties, go to the Security tab, select Users, click Edit, then select the Full Control check box in the Allow column).

Author-it: Word output

Sylvia asked the Author-it User Group about getting decent looking Word output from Author-it. Here is my response:

… the Word output is whatever you want it to be. It’s only limited by what you are capable of doing in Word (with some small limitations). Author-it ‘out of the box’ has some reasonable Word templates — did you try those?

Author-it doesn’t control your Word templates — you do. What Author-it does is map a path to your template(s) for publishing, maps the Author-it style names to the style names in the Word template, maps the auto text entries for headers and footers, and controls the page setup (via media objects).

You can *definitely* get great Word output from Author-it, but it’s entirely dependent on your ability to use Word. If you don’t have the skills, consider hiring an Author-it consultant to set up what you want — typically, it’s a one-off task.

Now a BIG word of advice — make copies of the ‘out of the box’ templates and store them in a subfolder called Originals or similar, BEFORE you fiddle with the Word templates. That way you can always go back to the default set if you stuff things up (technical term!). Another piece of advice: If you are in the early stages of evaluation, leave the templates alone for a while. Play with the interface, get familiar with the object and single-sourcing concepts, and run through the provided tutorial.

Author-it: HTML filenames

Margaret on the Author-it User Forum list wanted to know whether to use the auto-generated HTML filenames for her output (e.g. 1234.htm where 1234 is the Author-it object code ID number), or add her own ‘logical’ filenames to each Author-it topic object so that she gets filenames like printing_a_page.htm. She particularly wanted to know whether it matters if there are both in the Publishing folder, and whether it affects the way the Help works.

My response:

For HTML output, you’ll get <object_code.htm> unless you have explicitly entered a file name on the topic’s Web tab.

Having the filenames or object codes (or both) is neither here nor there as far as Author-it is concerned. However, you might want to consider your users, your deliverables, and your time!

USERS
If your output is going on to the Web (not internal), then a named file may be more readable. That said, if the output has a TOC/navigation pane the user tends to only ever see index.htm anyway, no matter which topic they’re reading.

DELIVERABLES
CHMs don’t care about filenames—everything is compiled into one file anyway. Other HTML outputs—see the info for ‘Users’ above.

YOUR TIME
To use filenames you have to manually decide on and add a filename to every new topic. There are a few issues to consider with this:

1. Filenames should not contain any spaces, unless you are ABSOLUTELY certain that the HTML files will only ever live on a Windows machine/host server.
2. Filenames must be unique.
3. If you duplicate a topic, you must remember to delete the duplicated filename and replace it with another, unique one. Otherwise you will get at least one topic that’s published as a blank topic where two or more with the same filename exist in the same book.

MY EXPERIENCE
When I first started using Author-it I was still hung up on unique file names for topics. I liked the look of them in a folder list, they had meaning to me, etc. However, the overhead of maintenance became something I didn’t want to continue, so I went back to using the default object codes. And you know what? It really didn’t make any difference at all—except free up a lot of ongoing maintenance time for me. Not one user ever noticed or complained.