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The Institute of Scientifi c and Technical CommunicatorsWinter 2014

Communicator

Communicator Winter 2014

25Mobile publishing and FrameMaker

Beyond PDF: move to smaller screensMaxwell Hoffmann from Adobe explains why we should all be making the move to mobile now.

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The ‘persistence of paper’For the past three to five years we’ve all witnessed an increase in conference presentations which address the apparent need to migrate our content to mobile. Tablet and mobile usage for web browsing and document consumption are obviously omnipresent. We do need to take this trend seriously. But, we should carefully balance it with a grain of common sense.Some journalists do a headcount of this morning’s commuters on the Tube who are reading something that resembles a document. (It’s probably the mobile version of ‘Hello’) After some mental arithmetic, these journalists come up with alarming statistics about how swiftly paper is exiting our lives. Personally I’ve seen more than one blog or article with a scary photo of some small college library furnished with empty metal book shelves.

Although most of us are ready to hurl some of our ring binders out the nearest window, we expect paper and PDF to completely exit our lives anytime soon. Which begs the question, ‘just how critical is technical communications delivery to smaller, portable screens?’

How urgent is this need to move to mobile?If you are like most of the technical communications professionals I’ve met at recent conferences, you probably view

publishing to mobile as one more unwanted task dropped on your table. You may even greet the prospect of this new deliverable with the same enthusiasm you reserve for an extra three languages added to your globalisation deliverables. Stay calm, and carry on; it’s much easier to publish to mobile than you may have thought. In fact, it can even be fun!

First of all, determine exactly who will be consuming your future mobile content. Be prepared to discover that the stakeholder who is driving this new initiative in your organisation has no idea. If you are able to identify these new consumers, determine what their needs are and how fully formed their expectations are.

It is always wise in this stage of a project to balance ‘needs’ against ‘wants.’ In many cases, you may discover that a segment of your customer base wants mobile documentation ‘because it’s there.’

In most cases, you will discover that customer needs are an evolving target in a nascent stage. This is actually a good thing. Why? Because it gives you time to experiment and try things out until you arrive at ‘the right thing to do.’

Since PDF will undoubtedly still be a prime deliverable, the best near-term solution is to identify a publishing method that enables you to work with one set of source files for print, PDF and mobile.

Communicator Winter 2014

26 Mobile publishing and FrameMaker

A hybrid publishing solutionRegardless of the publishing tool you are currently using, you can learn a great deal from a 30-day trial of Adobe FrameMaker. (No, this isn’t a product pitch.) Why? Because the latest version enables you to publish to up to 5 online formats with literally one click. The latest product release (version 12) includes a dozen new, colourful templates that cover most Technical communications projects, from reference cards and parts catalogues to user guides. The generic but colourful styles have been cleverly mapped to attractive equivalents in the online world.

Essentially, an Adobe FrameMaker trial gives you a chance to ‘test drive’ hybrid publishing to both PDF and mobile, in order to find out what you do and don’t like about the authoring process. At the end of the trial you aren’t committed to either Adobe or FrameMaker. But you will have become much more aware of what portion of your content actually needs to go to mobile.

A full meal? Or the ‘fast food’ version?Most conference presentations on hybrid publishing have focused on how to publish your entire 400 page user guide to tablets and mobile. This is usually done for simplicity’s sake and because 45 minutes won’t allow the time necessary to examine issues around reduced content for online consumption.

Whilst experimenting with your FrameMaker test drive, you will swiftly discover that you probably only need to publish a subset of your documentation to smaller screens. Fortunately you have several FrameMaker tools to accomplish this. With ‘regular’ (non-XML) FrameMaker, you can use conditional text to identify any portion of your content you wish to ‘hide’ in order to make a ‘low-calorie’ version of you publication. You can swiftly change conditional text settings to restore the ‘full meal’ version you wish to deliver to PDF.

If you are using the structured authoring workspace in FrameMaker to author in XML or DITA, you can filter by attributes to achieve streamlined or ‘full’ versions of your documentation with modest effort.

Try ‘one size fits all’ mobile publishingThe screen capture in Figure 1 shows the five popular online formats you may publish to with FrameMaker. I would suggest focusing your initial efforts on Responsive HTML5. You no doubt have seen a presentation or video

To sense a mobile consumer’s attention span, try reading a paperback book for 12 minutes while standing up

Figure 1. FrameMaker online output formats.

Figure 2. FrameMaker before publication, and then a resized browser which previews the same content for desktop, tablet and mobile.

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on this topic by now. Responsive HTML5 has defined ‘thresholds’ or certain pixel widths that will cause the web layout to magically adjust itself for desktop, tablet or mobile.

The first time you try this, it really does feel like magic. Especially if you have been in the workforce for a while and remember the early days of coding with HTML.

The screen captures in Figure 2 show a page in FrameMaker before publication, and then a resized browser which previews the same content for desktop, tablet and mobile.

In Figure 2, you will also notice that the navigation icons have shifted, from the LEFT for desktop, to the BOTTOM for tablets, and to SMALLER ICONS ON BOTTOM for mobile. FrameMaker offers 3 out-of-the box ‘one size fits all’ HTML5 layouts to choose from. You can easily customise portions of the layouts to achieve your own look and feel.

Notice that in the narrow mobile example, HTML5 has not only reduced table width, but has resized the graphic illustrations as well.

For comparison, examine the same FrameMaker template sample published to PDF in Figure 3. Familiar headers, footers and other document artefacts abound. Incidentally, the rocket will actually ‘fly’ if you click on the video image.

How hard is it to publish this way?The answer is shockingly simple. If you are content with the paper and online templates provided out-of-the box with FrameMaker, there is almost no effort at all. To ease your exploration, new templates were created as complete documents, filled with English text, numbered headings, index markers, cross references and a relatively complex ‘side head’ layout. There are even defined object styles, which you can select and redefine on the Reference Page, in order to make name graphics globally change colour or positions.

Obviously, neither FrameMaker nor publishing to smaller screens is a panacea. There are lessons to be learned when migrating to mobile, which is why I recommend this type of hands-on exploration. One of the biggest lessons is learning to ‘let go’ of some document constructs and formats we’ve all depended on for years.

What to ditch in your journey to leaner content?When publishing to smaller screens you’ll soon discover several document categories that require a second look. I list them with some of my own lessons below.

Fewer tables with less complexityMany of us have become accustomed to framing information within tables that could

be just as effective in a simple, 3-level list. The rampant use of tables sometimes fits what I call the ‘picture frame’ syndrome. When decorating hallways in your flat or office, you sometimes feel compelled to tack a poster on the wall every so many paces just to break up the monotony of cream coloured plaster.

Tables can and do work on smaller mobile screens. But you may want to try out the following guidelines: � Avoid using more than 3 columns � In your test output to HTML5, resize the browser to mobile size and avoid table depth that runs more than 3-4 screens. Reader retention is reduced on this platform, and you don’t have page breaks with repeating table ‘header rows’ to remind the reader of your categories

� Never, ever put a nested list in a table cell � Keep graphics within table cells small and to a minimum

� Look for opportunities to convert table content to lists.

Shorter lists with fewer levelsOn the vast expanse of A4 paper, many of us were accustomed to crossing that white tundra with attractive, narrow, multi-step lists. Think of paper (or PDF) as a large, vintage cinema screen. You have more area to work with and you can populate the space with more objects. In contrast to mobile, your audience is comfortably seated, and they have a longer attention span.

Figure 3. FrameMaker template sample published to PDF.

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Nested lists on mobile screens are swiftly squeezed into seemingly endless trails across multiple screens/thumb swipes. Your mobile consumers have reduced attention spans. Not only because of the mountain of information, but also because they are usually on their feet whilst reading. A good exercise, if you are new to mobile publishing, is to try reading a paperback book for 12 minutes while standing up. Your body will affect your attention span more than multiple streams of info via mobile.

Do footnotes really work?We’ve all contended with endless footnotes in Wikipedia, on a desktop screen larger than mobile. References are a necessary evil. But, navigating hyperlinks from footnotes swiftly becomes a nuisance when the customer has normal sized fingers on a tiny screen.

I don’t really have a solution for this. This is clearly an evolving area that needs further exploration. Traditional, academic research papers may extend the life of PDF, since there is no easy alternative for citations in the mobile world.

Mission-critical contentThe first time you publish a hefty publication (more than 60 pages) to HTML5 and examine it on a mobile-sized screen, you will be struck by the need to reduce your content. Successive thumb swipes on a mobile screen will quickly attune you to appropriate ‘depth’ or relative line count for content following section headings.

Traditional journalistic practices like the inverted pyramid (most important info first) will facilitate the process of identifying paragraphs in the nether regions that you can temporarily hide when publishing to mobile.

Select graphics that work at 25% of original sizeMany technical manuals include highly detailed wire-frame diagrams that fill entire pages. Ironically, this type of illustration can work better on mobile in PDF format, where the reader can ‘pinch to zoom’ on most devices.

In your test run with FrameMaker, try three different illustrations for the same concept, with varying degrees of detail and complexity. You may discover that multiple, progressive illustrations of just a portion of the illustration work better than the traditional images you’ve worked with in the past.

Make way for videoThis sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but remind yourself that you’re not limited to what you could do on paper. With FrameMaker, both PDF and HTML5 output can support video. This can be the swiftest way to

Mobile publishing and FrameMaker

Maxwell Hoffmann is Adobe’s Technical Communications Evangelist. A former product manager for FrameMaker at Frame Technology, Hoffmann also spent nearly 15 years

working with multi-lingual production and XML publishing in the language translation industry. Maxwell works from a virtual office on the western outskirts of Portland, Oregon, USA, where his hobby is identifying and collecting mid-Century antiques. He has been a featured speaker at the last three TCUK conferences. E: mhoffman@adobe.com W: http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm Tw: @maxwellhoffmann

reduced endless numbered ‘how to’ steps.You will soon discover that 3 to 4

successive ‘mini-videos’ can encapsulate the same information you conveyed in a dozen pages of nested lists and screen captures. If your videos are ‘silent,’ you have the added advantage of eliminating content that needs localisation. (This assumes that your video is capturing some type of equipment in action that can work without captions.)

Start your journey now, while there is still timeI began this article with some scepticism over the notion that PDF and paper will fly out the window by the end of next year. The demand for more useful mobile technical content is growing. We must overcome the temptation to bury our heads in the sand when confronted with yet another sea change in technology.

Ironically, new authoring solutions like FrameMaker and Captivate make video creation and publishing to ‘the small screen’ more accessible than ever. The irony of this new publishing paradigm is this: once you master these new workflows and techniques, hybrid publishing to PDF and mobile can actually reduce your workflow rather than increase it.

Now, when is the last time you’ve heard that? So, come aboard and join me in this journey. There are no experts. And, you have as much capacity to discover massive time-savers as any pundit you listen to at a conference. I can hardly wait to hear what you have to share at TCUK 2015. C