Plan-B for Software Documentation

I just read that Full circle a new Ubuntu magazine is out with its first issue.

The first issue contains:

• Install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, step by step
• Howtos:
  • Linux Directory Structure
  • MythTV Intro
  • Scribus (desktop publishing) Part I
  • Add/Remove Software
• Review: GRAMPS geneaology software
• Interview: Deluge BitTorrent Client developer
• Standard Categories:
  • News
  • “Top 5″
  • Letters
  • Desktops
  • and much more

This magazine is 42 pages long, delivered only online as a PDF and meant to be printed. The layout should make a solid printed magazine, if you have that much color ink to spare. I guess if you mix it in to the stacks at a doctor’s waiting room, not many would notice its an online magazine. However that is also its downside. I find it hard to read online, because the pages are laid out two at a time and that makes either the font illegible on my old 19″ monitor or it does require a lot of dragging left to right (as opposed to scrolling with the wheel). I’d love if they could format a version for linear reading formats.

What peeked my curiosity is the tools it is produced with, Scribus, OpenOffice.org and Gimp. I’d like to hear more about how it is produced and what the role of each application is. Well that topic might come up in the next parts about Scribus. I look forward to it.

Computerworld writes abut the defeat of bills pro ODF in six states. The proposed legislation would have in one way or another mandated that state agencies in California, Florida, Texas,
Oregon, Connecticut, and Minnesota, need to use open standards for office documents. The only currently accepted open standard that is implemented by more than one vendor is ODF/ISO 26300.

However, lobbying by Microsoft kept legislators from demanding that electronic office documents are stored in non proprietary formats, so they can be accessed in many years to come. Interestingly, most legislative comments do not doubt that this is a worthy goal. However they do feel used by either side of the debate and their lobbying interests. So they squashed most bills without a vote. I guess the companies gathered in the ODF Alliance lost a battle, but they don’t declare the war over.

The developers of OpenOffice.org have implemented some major improvement of memory usage for OpenOffice.org Calc. In their sample spreadsheet it reduces the overall memory requirement by 28%. I have some users of OOo complain to me that Calc could not handle very large spreadsheet and it so it was very slow. This could be a major step to alleviate their pain.

Don’t hold your breath yet, because this improvement will only come to you with release 2.3 planned in September 2007.

According to Susan Lister, OpenOffice.org is a good tool to convert your Powerpoint presentations into good looking web pages.

Susan is dissatisfied with “clunky ‘powerpoint to webpage’ slideshows”, produced by MS Powerpoint. so she looked for a better solution and found it in OpenOffice.org Impress. She discovered:

These experiments showed that I can make a better web page set up using Open Office - my final website was a smaller file size as well as smaller in the amount of screen real estate. I liked the fact that html wizard gave me control over whether I wanted frames, show notes included and a title screen as well the size of the final presentation (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768).

Susan discovered, that the HTML web pages created by Impress not only look better but are also smaller by a factor of 10.

Reading the Technology Enhanced Learning blog, today I discovered an open source web conferencing application, called WebHuddle.

To my delight WebHuddle does offer support for OpenOffice.org Impress files to share with the audience.

What type of content may I upload for my meeting?

You may upload any combination of Microsoft Powerpoint files, Open Office Impress files, individual GIF or JPEG images, and ZIP files containing GIF or JPEG images. Note that Powerpoint animations are not visible when displayed in WebHuddle.

WebHuddle is a server centric approach to web conferencing. It server is based on Java servlet technology. The client is a small Java applet of less than 175k. It provides the basic features of sharing presentations, the desktop, files, and interacting with questions to the presenter and questionnaires. Optionally it can add a Voice over IP audio channel. In addition the whole session can be recorded and played back virtually identical.

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org celebrates fast expansion of its help topics supported by screencasts.

Within two weeks, we were able to grow the number of screencasts by 50%. Most new screencasts deal with paragraph formatting.

Some of the new additions are:

• Define space above paragraphs
• Define space below paragraphs
• Keep lines together in a paragraph or keep paragraphs together on the same page
• Also control orphan paragraphs and widow paragraphs on a page

If you like fancy document formatting then you need to check out how to create drop cap letters at the beginning of a paragraph.

We look forward to your comments on the new help topics.

As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.

The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.

Use Plan-B for OpenOffice.org to learn more about how to configure Writer for optimal MS document compatibility.

I can’t believe what I just found on the Yahoo!Search Blog about removing pages from a website. The author says “The best way to remove dead URLs from the Yahoo! Search index is to return an HTTP Error 404 when our crawler requests the page.”

Are they serious, really serious?

The HTTP spec clearly says return code 404 is “Not Found” temporarily and 410 is “Gone” permanently. They even say in th explanation for code 404 “The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.”

Yahoo slurp is free to treat a 404 page as if removed although I don’t think it serves the searching public well. However, I can’t understand why the Yahoo!Search blog teaches webmasters to send a 404 if a 410 return code is appropriate.

Just needed to rant about this, because this blog has for sure a wide readership.