Adobe InDesign in Technical Writing

Adobe InDesign

This Course in meant for people who are highly focused in learning and mastering Adobe InDesign. People in Technical Writing, E-Publishing, Printing, Desktop Publishing, Traditional Publishing, Data Conversion, and Content Development can join this course.

SESSION 1          

Introduction to Adobe InDesign

SESSION 2          

Working with Text Frames

SESSION 3          

Working with Characters

SESSION 4          

Understanding Vector images

SESSION 5          

Working with Images

SESSION 6          

Working with Objects

SESSION 7          

Working with Pages

SESSION 8          

Stories

SESSION 9          

The Document Interface

SESSION 10        

Output

SESSION 11        

Smart way out!

SESSION 12        

Collaborating Concepts

Assignment, Test, and Certification

 The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premier Institutes in the field of Technical Writing.

Become a Certified Technical Writer

Want to become a Professional Technical Writer?

What is Technical Writing?

Technical Writing is writing on a specific subject for a specific purpose to a specific audience.

Technical Writers can be considered as a bridge between people who know technology and people who use it. They understand the intricacies and complications of technology and put it in simple words that help the user understand and use the technology.

What do Technical Writers do?

A technical writer’s job will be to gather information from various sources, comprehend the technology, and put it in simple and easy-to-understand language for the end user.

The following are some of the documents a technical writer creates:

• User Manuals
• Online Help Content
• Reports
• Brochures
• Process Documents
• Business Proposals
• Resumes
• Memorandum
• Minutes
• Feature Modules
• Release Notes
• Policies and Procedures

Who can be successful in Technical Writing?

Technical Writing is considered as both Science and Art. It is a science because there is a methodical way of doing technical writing. It is an art because it involves writing. People with inclination and passion for writing can score as good technical writers. The following are the attributes expected of a technical writer:

• Good written communication skills
• Flair for writing (Simple but good English is preferred)
• Inclination to learn new technologies
• Working knowledge of computers

 What is the scope for Technical Writing?

With the advancements in the field of Information Technology, the way any business happens has changed, and the emphasis on quality has increased. Owing to this factor of attaining perfect quality, the market needs professional Technical Writers who are masters in communicating the right information to the right people.

The growing demand for Professional Technical Writers is increasing exponentially

In order to maintain India’s competitive advantage of technically skilled knowledge-workers with the right mix of technical, business and functional skills, the workforce needs to increase by at least 10-fold by 2008

As per the Nasscom-McKinsey report 1999, India needs to have at least 2.2 million knowledge workers in IT software and services related areas by 2008

Technical Writers are a part of these knowledge professionals and companies have started realising the importance of hiring professional Technical Writers.

Technical Writing not only applies to the field of Information Technology, but also extends to other fields like:

Pharmaceutical, Aeronautical, Automobile, Mechanical, Chemical, and many other fields

What salaries do Technical Writers get?

Technical Writing proves to be a very good career option. A fresher in the field of technical writing gets paid around Rs.12,000 per month. A technical writer with two years of experience is able to draw about Rs.25,000 per month. Efficient and Experienced Technical Writers get monthly salaries running to lakhs. For current figures you can refer to: www.stc-india.org, the official website of Society for Technical Communicators (STC) in India. Apart from these employment opportunities, technical writing also provides lots of scope for freelancing.

The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premium Institutes in the field of Technical Writing.

Branch Offices:

Chennai: T.Nagar | Mandavelli | Anna Nagar (Aminjikarai)

Pune, Hyderabad.

XML, DITA, and Structured Authoring in Technical Writing

Course Description

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an end-to-end, XML-based architecture for authoring, managing, and publishing your organization's technical content. DITA was designed to meet the evolving needs of organizations in the face of today's business requirements — for managing and publishing content for multiple products, multiple audiences, and multiple output formats... Larger organizations increasingly prefer DITA to proprietary document storage formats, as DITA offers significant efficiency and usability advantages. But DITA is not limited to large organizations; it makes good sense for projects of any size to be moved to the DITA architecture. This course provides an overview of DITA, its capabilities, and its possibilities for transforming your technical publishing processes.

1. Unstructured Documentation

1.1. Fundamental Activities in documentation (Merging Documents, Maintenance, updations and Translation)

1.2. Drawbacks in terms of reusability, interoperability, and maintenance

2. What is structured documentation?

2.1. Comparative study of structured and unstructured documentation

2.2. Early History of Literacy Key Concepts of IBM Information Design" Discussion of Document Reuse

3. Introduction to XML

3.1. Introduction to XML

3.2. What is XML?

3.3. HTML Vs XML

3.4. XML elements and attributes

3.5. XML documentation

3.6. Hierarchy of XML elements

3.7. Introduction to XML Information Modeling

3.8. An overview of DTD

3.9. Expressing your document model as an XML document type definition (DTD)

3.10. Learning XML terminology and syntax

3.11. Introduction to XSLT for XML Publishing

3.12. Formatting output using CSS and XSLT

4. Introduction to DITA

4.1. What is DITA?

4.2. Principles and Architecture

4.3. Introduction to DITA Topics

4.4. Defining Concept

4.5. Defining Task

4.6. Defining Reference

4.7. DITA Maps and Domains

4.8. Specialization in DITA

4.9. Information Modeling for DITA

4.10. Minimalist Documentation Strategies

5. Migration of legacy content to DITA

5.1. Steps and procedure

5.2. Implementation

6. New DITA projects

6.1. Steps and procedure

6.2. Implementation

7. Structured FrameMaker

7.1. Choosing a workflow

7.2. Understanding the interaction of DITA and FrameMaker

7.3. Opening DITA files

7.4. Saving DITA files

7.5. Authoring DITA topics

7.6. Managing elements ID

7.7. Creating cross-references

7.8. Creating content references

7.9. Graphics

7.10. Tables Indexing Conditional content

7.11. Organizing topics with DITA maps

7.12. Creating PDF files

7.13. Working with DITA open Toolkit

7.14. FrameMaker’s fm elements

7.15. Changing formatting of DITA content

7.16. Modifying DITA structure

7.17. DITA options

7.18. Additional resources

8. DITA proof-of-concept prototypes using customer content

9. DITA project designs implementation and reviews

10. Publishing system implementation

10.1. Structured input published to multiple output targets

11. Content management system integration

12. Localization and translation

 The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premier Institutes in Technical Writing.

 

PG Diploma in Technical Writing

Post Graduate Diploma Course in Technical Writing

This course is designed to suit people who are already into Technical Writing and want to enhance or fine-tune their skills and acquire a cutting edge over others. Those who have already completed the Diploma Course in Technical Writing from KBuffer and those who are looking at Career options as a Professional Technical Writer can also take this. In short, those who have a mission and a vision in pursuit of Technical Writing career is suggested this course.

PG Diploma in Technical Writing

Method of Instruction:

·        Direct from our centre

·        Online through our Instructor-led Virtual Classroom

·        Self-Paced Learning through our Web Interface

·        Blended (A mix of the methods mentioned above)

Course Curriculum

Types of Writing

·         Introduction to the Writing Process

·         Introduction to Technical Writing

·         DDLC

·         Types of Technical Writing

o   Procedural Writing

o   Paragraph Writing

o   Report Writing

o   Writing for Electronic Media

Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publication

1.    General Topics

2.    Content Formatting and Layout

3.    Global Content

4.    Content for Software Developers

5.    Web Content

6.    Grammatical Elements

7.    Punctuation

8.    List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

Various Types of Documents Created by Technical Writers

1.    Proposal

2.    User Guide

3.    White Paper

4.    Fact Sheets

Publishing Concepts

1.    Variable Headers and Footers

2.    Using Em Dash, En Dash, and so on

3.    Using White Space

4.    Color Theory

5.    Font Theory

6.    Printing Basics

Advanced Concepts of Technical Writing

·         Introduction to Structured Authoring

·         DITA – Theory and Practice

·         XML – taking documentation to next level

·         Different Manual of Stylesheets which explain usage of appropriate Terminology, Tone, and Language

Tools

·         Advanced Microsoft Word

·         Adobe Technical Communication Suite which includes:

o   Adobe FrameMaker (including Structured Authoring)

o   Adobe RoboHelp

o   Adobe Captivate

o   Adobe Photoshop

o   Adobe Acrobat

·         Adobe InDesign

·         Microsoft Visio

·         Techsmith Snagit

Regular Assignments

Two Tests

Final Exam

Project

The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premier Institutes in the field of Technical Writing.

 

ePublishing

Introduction of e-Publishing

E-publishing (or) ePub (short for electronic publication) is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).Electronic publishing (also referred to as e-publishing or digital publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, EPUBs, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues.

EPub is a format for digital books. ePub books are text files that are structured according to the ePub DTD, as defined by the IDPF. Files have the extension .epub.Valid .epub files can then be used on any platform or device that supports ePub.ePub can be generated in two different modes

Modes in ePub

• Standard ePub
• Fixed Layout ePub

Standard epub

What is Standard epub?

Standard ePub has “reflowable text”, meaning it allows the text to adapt to the size of the display screen. As the user increases the font size in the device the text will flow according to the display in the devices.

Text Extraction

Text from the PDF is extracted by using Adobe Acrobat or from the indesign file if any.

Editors and Pre-editing / Xhtml Conversion

Editors (Epsilon, Edit Plus, Notepad++, etc.) generally provides the features working with element tags. Syntax highlighting is a basic standard of any editor; that is, they color element text differently from regular text. Element and attribute completion based on a DTD. Displaying line numbers is also a common and useful feature, as is providing the ability to reformat a document to follow to a particular style of indenture.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language.CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

Image Cropping

Cropping of the images from the supplied source PDF using Adobe Photoshop.

ePub Conversion

ePub files are generated through WinZip with the help of OPF, html, NCX, and CSS files.

Adobe Digital Editions and Device View

The generated ePub file will be viewed in Adobe Digital Editions version 2.0 and devices to verify formatting and links.

Fixed Layout epub

What is Fixed Layout epub?

Fixed Layout epub has “Fixed text”, meaning the text will gets fixed on the background image.If the user increases the font size in the device the text will not flow to the next page in the devices.

Text Extraction

Text from the PDF is extracted by using Adobe Acrobat or from the indesign file if any.

Editors and Pre-editing / Xhtml Conversion

Editors (Epsilon, Edit Plus, Notepad++, etc.) generally provides the features working with element tags. Syntax highlighting is a basic standard of any editor; that is, they color element text differently from regular text. Element and attribute completion based on a DTD. Displaying line numbers is also a common and useful feature, as is providing the ability to reformat a document to follow to a particular style of indenture.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language. CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

Image Cropping

Remove text from the background image and capture the single-page as images from supplied source PDF using Adobe Photoshop.

ePub Conversion

ePub files are generated through WinZip with the help of OPF, Xhtml, NCX, and CSS files.

Device View

The generated ePub file will be viewed in devices to verify formatting and links.

The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premium Institutes in ePublishing.

Instructional Designing in eLearning

Instructional Designing

Instructional Designing is the art and science of designing instructions for the trainer or about training method. It involves analyzing, designing, developing, implementing,   and evaluating the specific task or problem.

Instructional designers act as a bridge between academicians and trainer or teacher suggesting them on methodologies to be followed to train a specific audience on a specific subject.

Instructional Design: Process, Needs, and Roles

Instructional Design: Analysis and Objectives

Instructional Design: Design Concepts

Instructional Design: Planning and Implementation

Instructional Design: Evaluation

The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premium Institutes in the field of eLearning.

eLearning

About the Course

The course is designed to make the candidate a thorough-bred professional in E Learning. The course covers all aspects related to E Learning including Learning Management System (LMS) and industry-standard tools such as Adobe Captivate and Adobe Flash.

Instructional Designing concepts and various learning theories that are in vogue in the industry are also covered in depth.

Introduction to eLearning

• What is E-Learning?
• Demo of E-Learning course
• Scope of E-Learning
• Applications of E-Learning

Types of E-Learning

• Media Based
• Audience Based

Approaches to E-Learning

• Topic based
• Game based
• Simulation Based

The Writing Process

• Self-Discovery exercise on the writing process
• Instructional Designing

The creative part in E-Learning

• Importance of Interactions
• Screen Limitations
• Different Interactive Ideas
• Graphics and Animation

Writing for E-Learning

• General
• The Language Part Diction Transition - Importance and a few pointers
• Writing for Specific Audience
• Reinforcements/Feedbacks

Storyboarding

• What is Storyboarding?
• Are you a Director?
• Exercises on Storyboarding

For Kids

For Graduates

For Corporates

Tools Used for Creating E-Learning Courses

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Captivate
• Adobe Flash

The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premium Institutes in the field of E-Learning.

 

Adobe InDesign in Technical Writing

Adobe InDesign

This Course in meant for people who are highly focused in learning and mastering Adobe InDesign. People in Technical Writing, E-Publishing, Printing, Desktop Publishing, Traditional Publishing, Data Conversion, and Content Development can join this course.

SESSION 1          

Introduction to Adobe InDesign

SESSION 2          

Working with Text Frames

SESSION 3          

Working with Characters

SESSION 4          

Understanding Vector images

SESSION 5          

Working with Images

SESSION 6          

Working with Objects

SESSION 7          

Working with Pages

SESSION 8          

Stories

SESSION 9          

The Document Interface

SESSION 10        

Output

SESSION 11        

Smart way out!

SESSION 12        

Collaborating Concepts

Assignment, Test, and Certification

 The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premier Institutes in Technical Writing.

Adobe Captivate in Technical Writing.

  Adobe Captivate

•   What is Captivate?
•   What is new in Captivate?
•   Key Features and typical areas of application
•   The Work Environment in Captivate
•   Branching View
•   The Size and Position Tab
•   The Filmstrip
•   Toolbars and Menus
•   Working Colors with the Color Picker 
•   Movie Preferences
•   Object Properties Management
•   Branching Management 
•   Editing & Exporting Branching Views 
•   Recording Options and related Tips
•  Recording Modes
•  Setting the Recording Capture Area
•   Full Motion Recording
•   Recording New Application Movies
•   Adding Slide Notes
•   Adding Text Captions
•   Creating Rollover Captions
•   Converting Tooltips to Rollover Captions
•   Importing & Exporting Captions
•   Adding Audio
•   Audio Recording Options
•   Using Audio with Slide Objects
•   Advanced Audio Management
•   Adding Multimedia
•   Adding Images
•   Adding Rollover Images
•   Adding Animations
•   Adding Animated Text
•   Adding Animation Slides
•   Preparing Video for Captivate
•   Progressively Downloading FLV Files
•   Streaming FLV Content
•   Adding Interactive Elements
•   Adding Highlight Boxes
•   Adding Click Boxes
•   Adding Text Entry Boxes
•   Adding Buttons
•   Adding Interactivity
•   Creating Branching Movies
•   Scenario Simulations with the Project Wizard
•   Scenario Simulations Using Templates
•   Creating Question Slides
•   Creating a True/False Question Slide
•   Creating Fill-in the Blank Slides
•   Creating Matching Question Slides
•   Creating Multiple Choice Question Slides
•   The Quiz Manager
•   Adding Zoom Areas
•   Editing Zoom Areas
•   The Advanced Interaction Dialog
•   Linking Movies With the Menu Builder
•   Creating a MenuBuilder Project
•   Modifying a MenuBuilder Project
•   Adding Interactivity to Your Menus
•   Exporting MenuBuilder Projects
•   Publishing Movies
•   Publishing EXE Files
• Publishing Flash Files
• Publishing Movies as Handouts
• Publishing to the Web Using FTP

 The Author is working for KBufferIndia, one of the premier Institutes in the field of Technical Writing.