April/May 2005

Volume 45, Number 5

Solutions, Inc.

by Ron Arner

Some recent tips, how-to's, and advice from the Rocky Mountain Chapter Listserve:

Thread #1: Adobe to Acquire Macromedia:

Well, we already know that RoboHelp was twilighted by Macromedia when they bought eHelp, now, Adobe buys Macromedia - should be interesting:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html

Thread #2: Imaging Outsourcing/Technology?:

Members:
I have a paper-only source document of about 300 pages that I need to get into an online form so that I can post it to an intranet site. I don't need to be able to modify the document (online access is sufficient), but it is important for the image to be identical to the original.

Scanning is an obvious solution, but the file size would be prohibitive. Does anyone know of another technology that might accomplish the same thing or, even better, someone who might provide such a service?

Thanks, in advance, for your thoughts and advice.

This sounds like a job for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which converts a scanned image into a smaller Word or PDF file.The downside is that these programs are not all that good at converting tables, columns and other tricky layouts. You may have to do a lot of reformatting, and smell-checking (sic) is a must to avoid painful errors. The most popular programs for Windows are Scansoft OmniPage and ABBYY FineReader. You can download a free trial of FineReader (www.abbyyusa.com) to see if it meets your needs.

My guess is that a 300-page PDF would be about 2.5 MB. I don't think you'll be able to do much better than that if you need the image to be exactly like the original. You should be able to scan direct-to-PDF (or use a fax-to-PDF service such as Maxemail) If that's too big, then you might have to re-evaluate your requirements and consider HTML.

Thread #3: Database Interface:

STC'ers,
I've learned that a potential upcoming project for me is to re-design a Webpage that interfaces with an SQL database. The Webpage re-design part doesn't bother me, but I don't know where to begin as far as interaction with the database is concerned. I'm inexperienced at writing scripts of this kind. The page will need to include a search function, the ability for members of the committee to login to the database, and the ability for these same members to post new contributions/reviews to the site.

Can anyone recommend good resources that would lead me in the right direction? If so, I would greatly appreciate it!

I'm a novice myself so I don't have a specific reference for you - look at Amazon for books about creating .asp pages (active server pages). Here's one possible link that may get you up to speed quickly…

ASP.NET for Dummies (for beginning to intermediate users, includes CD-ROM w/ sample database)

ASP.NET For Dummies gets you going in a hurry. Instead of having to wade through pages of theory before you can actually play with the technology, you get to jump in and create your first ASP.NET page in the very first chapter! Find out how to

• Understand ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET terms and languages
• Create cool elements with ASP.NET's built-in objects
• Discover ways to let Web site users enter information and get responses
• Validate user input
• Use the .NET Framework Class Library to teach your applications new tricks
• Enable users to access information from a database and keep the information up to date
• Combine ASP.NET with other technologies to create more exciting Web applications

You'll have to interface between the webpages and the database with some middleware. There are lots of kinds but they all basically work the same….some sort of scripting to get the data and put it in the database or pull it out. One thing, you'll probably have to learn some SQL, which is the language to talk to a SQL database. Normally you just embed your SQL commands right into the middleware scripts.

Give me a call if you want to talk about it. Incidentally, I highly recommend that you learn to do this. Technical communicators that can do some (or much) of their own scripting code are much more in demand than those who don't. There are many, many, many websites devoted to helping people do this type of work….most of them are specific to a type of middleware language such as perl, ASP, mySql, ColdFusion, etc.. etc.

One other thing…you should learn as much as possible about how the website will be hosted. Depending on the hosting software such as Microsoft, Solaris, Linux, etc., this will dictate a lot about the database tools and the middleware tools that you'll want to use.

If you like, subscribe to the STC Webmasters list and post your question there. When you complete the form to subscribe, please put Rocky Mountain with your name.

The URL is: http://lists.stc.org/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=stcwebmaster-l.

The Online Information SIG is being reactivated, and if you join you can also use the mailing list of that SIG.