I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to install Adobe Creative Suite 4 on my work machine. I was the last of four of us on a group license to install it. And I was the lucky one who ran into problems with the installation.

Specifically, when I got past entering the serial number and telling the installer where to install the programs, I got to a page saying “Preparing to Install…” The Install button was disabled for about ten seconds, and then it was enabled. If I clicked it, the same thing happened. It was one of those “how to keep an idiot busy” situations.

I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 and got some help disabling the anti-virus software on the computer (which I didn’t have rights to do). So if you encounter this problem, try these first (if you’re running Vista, try Service Pack 1).

After trying a lot of different things with one of my department’s technical support reps, we managed to install Fireworks only. After that, I could install Dreamweaver and Acrobat 9. But nothing else would go. I even tried searching on Adobe’s site for some information and found a forum thread that wasn’t completely resolved.

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I finally updated to WordPress 2.8 today. It looks a lot like the previous version, and I haven’t taken time to explore the new aspects yet.

However, I realized why it can be good to wait a little while to upgrade something like WordPress. After I installed the new version, I got an error similar to the one displayed at menoob.com in a post about the issue.

I followed the suggestion there, though I used FileZilla to change the plugin file name. (Fortunately, of all the plugins that could have failed, this one isn’t critical.) Bam! I could sign in to my admin site. My thanks to the menoob guy.

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Yes, I know CS3 isn’t the latest version, but due to trying to eliminate unnecessary expenses, our team isn’t getting CS4 at this point. I’m posting this more for myself because every time I need to do a TOC in InDesign, I’ve forgotten the details. (However, a colleague did ask about this today, so I’m posting it for our future reference.)

This procedure involves getting the styles for the TOC entries matched up correctly with various heading levels.

1. In the .indd file where the TOC will appear, create styles for the TOC entries; for example, TOC Level 1, TOC Level 2. Include any justification and tab leaders. I’ve found that to get the entry to run across the page, you have to choose Right Justify on the Indents and Spacing page of the Paragraph Style Options dialog. On the Tabs page, I also click the Right-Justified Tab button and put a space and a period in the Leader field. (The space keeps the periods from looking jammed together when I generate the TOC later.)
2. If the TOC is in a separate document from the rest of the content, import the paragraph styles (for example, heading 1 and heading 2) that you want to match to the TOC entries.
3. Go to Layout > Table of Contents Styles.
4. Click New.
5. Enter a name. The Title is the text that will show up at the top of the TOC, so enter something like “Contents.” In the Style box, pick the paragraph style that you want to use for the title—probably the same as whatever your level 1 heading is.
6. The Styles in Table of Contents section is for telling the TOC what text you want to show up. You choose the paragraph styles, and the TOC pulls in all text in those styles. Click a style in the Other Styles list and click Add. You have to select the styles in the order or hierarchy that you want them to show up in the TOC.
7. With a paragraph style selected in the Include Paragraph Styles box, set up how the entry should appear using the Style section. Choose one of the TOC styles you created in step one. For Between Entry and Number, I choose the Tab Character so it shows the space and period.
8. Under Options, I select Create PDF Bookmarks and Include Book Document (if I’m doing a book, of course).
9. Click OK. Then when you generate the TOC, go to Layout > Table of Contents, pick the TOC setup you just created, and then generate it.

Somehow, I ended up with a few help topics missing from a set of RoboHelp source files today. Subversion had removed them, and RoboHelp didn’t know where they were. I haven’t solved the case of how that happened, and at this point I don’t really care, because Subversion allowed me to fix the problem.

When I discovered that the topics were missing, I knew the wrong thing to do would be to import the corresponding output files. For WebHelp, RH inserts JavaScript and possibly other code into each topic in the output, and if you import an output topic, you have to deal with stripping out that extra code so it isn’t duplicated later.

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At the STC Summit, Tom Johnson and I gave a presentation entitled “Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation.” Frankly, I was kind of proud of that title because it just fit within the eight-word limit.

Like usual when I’m speaking in public, I was nervous beforehand, my mouth went dry within the first few minutes, and after that I was fine.

Overall, comments were good. Someone went as far as to say that our presentation gave him the most specific information in the three years he’s attended the Summit. We had a full room, and three people watched from the hall. On the other hand, an anonymous (according to Tom) person tweeted that our presentation was more frustrating than interesting and lacked a moderator and concreteness. I’m not sure why the person chose to be anonymous; I hope it wasn’t a fear of some kind of backlash. Tom and I aren’t going to turn around and send hate-tweets.

It was a good experience, but after something like that, I feel like not presenting for the next five years. It’s a lot of buildup to that one hour, and then afterward I second-guess my performance. As Tom pointed out as we discussed it later, that piece of negative feedback did make us think about how to do better. If the world had no naysayers or detractors, maybe we’d have less motivation to improve things.

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RoboHelp has been a bit infamous for bad Word output. That’s a reason one of my colleagues picked Flare (he also got a free copy, so that helped)—Flare smoothly moves CSS styles over to styles in Word that preserve the appearance.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my default list styles in a Word template to align the way I want so when I output from RoboHelp to Word, they’ll automatically take on that alignment. (Come to find out that there’s no way to tweak the list styles for “Normal.” Lameness.)

I know the Word-to-RH import and RH-to-Word output have been improved in RH8, but that doesn’t help me right now.

Anyway, while I was messing with this list problem, my eyes opened and saw the reason for bad Word output.

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I figured this little technique out a while back and have been meaning to post the find. This technique that saves me a few clicks and some time. I stumbled across this because it just occurred to me once to try it with InDesign, and it worked. Later on, I figured if it worked in InDesign, then why not Fireworks? Lo and behold.

In both Adobe InDesign and Fireworks, you can import image files to the file you are currently viewing by clicking and dragging the file from Windows Explorer to the spread or canvas. (I would guess this also works on other platforms that support these programs.) This is a shortcut if you have Explorer open to the directory where you’re manipulating files. It saves going to File > Place (InDesign) or File > Import (Fireworks) and then browsing for the image file.