I Want My Rounded Boxes

Word is not a paging program, but working with it can give you an appreciation for just how much can be reproduced in Word: tinted boxes, vertical type, custom borders, and other graphically pleasing touches that make a book attractive.

You can get almost anything reproduced in Word. The question is, Should you?

Some reasons for caution:

• Word elements are not as easy to control as elements in a paging program. Adding tints or borders because of their graphical appeal, rather than their pedagogical necessity, can mean more elements to juggle on a page than you really need to.
• Word files are prone to corruption, especially from drawing objects. Drawing objects include boxes and shapes. While many of these are necessary for features and image placeholders, shapes that are there for aesthetic purposes can be eliminated to simplify the Word file and minimize the chance of Word corruption.

The goal in WriteRAP is to have a viable representation of the finished page, and to ensure elements take up the correct amount of room. It is more important that a 24x12 box take up 24x12 than that its corners are rounded, or that its tint exactly matches the Quark or InDesign file.

When you look at your design, look for things that are pedagogically significant to be reproduced: examples, for instance, might have a vertical or end rule that is used to separate the example from the body text. This is a meaningful graphical element that needs to be reproduced. However, if these examples are tinted in addition, you probably don't need that as well, and not having the tint will mean easier handling of your content.

You might wonder, if you have a box anyway, why can't it just have rounded corners? And the answer is that in Word, you can't just make the corners rounded - you have to add a drawing object and keep it grouped or anchored in your text. And that's when things can get messy.

If you are going direct to PDF, it may be worth a little extra work to get the graphic touches that you want. If you can alter your design to minimize these items, that's great, but when you can't, go ahead and use rounded boxes. If they make the file harder to work with, you can work with simpler elements during editing and have the vendor swap in the complicated version as part of the finalization process.

Word Tips 2

Quick Case Changes

You can toggle through cases - UPPER CASE, lower case, Sentence case, and Title Case - by pressing Shift-F3 in Windows and Shift-FN-F3 on Mac.

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Did you know you can highlight vertically in Word?

This is a fun one for Word trivia buffs - all of whom probably need intensive therapy.

If you want to highlight vertically - say you have a vertical row of equation numbers hanging to the right of your equations, or line numbers hanging off to the left of your reading or computer code - and you want to apply the same character style for all of them, this will be useful. On Windows, hold down Ctrl-Alt-Shift, or on Mac hold down Ctrl-Command-Shift [Ctrl-Apple-Shift], and start dragging your cursor down. Once you've made your selection, apply your character style.

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Better Rulers in Tables

Speaking of the Alt key (or option key, on Mac): You know how annoying it is trying to adjust the width of table columns by dragging the vertical rule? Hold down the Alt key to change this uninformative ruler:

to this much more interesting one:

Can I Use My Old Extraction?

Most extractions can be used or repurposed for use with WriteRAP.

The WriteRAP workflow includes a Quark plug-in called BatchXPort Pro (soon to be an InDesign add-in called BatchXSLT). This software is used to extract both the design (for the template) and contents from the chapter. It is absolutely required that a template created from a Quark or InDesign design file must use this software.

But for content - the chapter files you are actually working with - most extractions can be used or reworked for use in WriteRAP.

Traditional extractions preserve ETM (or XID) style names, include XML tags, and normally drop art and features to the end of the file. WriteRAP extractions also preserve style names, but they contain no XML tags, and they normally have the photos and features inline. Macros are provided to vendors that will remove XML tags from traditional extractions, and, if style names exist, will clean them up. Features and photos are moved into place during the layout of a chapter.

An extraction that is provided as raw text with no styles can still be used - but the vendor will need to style all the content. In this case, you might want to get a quote from the vendor to determine which approach will be less expensive - generally, simpler books can be styled quickly and easily, and with no more effort than creating a new extraction. But for a complex book with a lot of styles, the vendor may be able to save some time by doing a new extraction.

Too Many Styles!

So you're looking at a WriteRAP project and all those ETM styles. And you're wondering how you can get your author to see this new tools as a benefit.

Here are some strategies to consider for protecting your author from the abundance of styles that are a necessary part of ETM.

Request a trimmed-down style list. Styles can exist in a WriteRAP document without being seen by the author. What styles does the author really need? Probably body copy, and a few lists. Maybe feature material and captions. They probably don't need every iteration of text that can appear in a feature box - the copyeditor or markup person will go in and apply the full style set.

Use boilerplates. An author almost doesn't have to think about styles at all if they can place pre-formatted copy and just type over what's there.

How about those hot keys? You can request hot keys in WriteRAP - alt-P for body (paragraph) text, for example, or shift-alt-N for numbered lists. If there is a lot of repeat styling you want your author to do, consider asking for hot keys.

And don't forget about the stylemarked document! The sampler should be a good guide to anyone working in the project. You don't have to know what EXM_NL means to apply the style, if you have the sampler in front of you.

Why the Help Desk Is Important

Whenever problems are encountered in WriteRAP and you need to seek help, you will often hear a CMS person tell you to contact the help desk. We're not just passing the buck, though.

Two key reasons for contacting the help desk are:

1. Help desk requests/issues can be tracked and monitored. This tracking can assist in finding problems that are beyond a single user or project that need resolution, help in determining adequate response to issues, etc. If we don't have the tracking data, this sort of measuring is much more difficult to do.
2. Help desk requests, especially as we are learning WriteRAP, provide opportunities for the help desk staff to learn, making them more efficient and knowledgeable in the future and spreading the knowledge and experience across a wider Pearson.

Currently, the help desk works on resolving problems as fast as they can, targeting a resolution within 24 hours. But that doesn't mean the help desk starts looking at the problem at hour 22. They are, instead, looking at it very quickly and answering as fast as possible. Sometimes, they need to escalate issues up to the CMS Structured Authoring team, where we assist in the problem resolution. This enables the help desk as well to better and more quickly resolve a like issue in the future.

If you come to us with a problem, we will, of course, work diligently to resolve it as quickly as possible, but don't be surprised if we ask you to inform the help desk of this issue (even if it has been resolved).

Template Library Now Live

CMS is very pleased to announce the official release of the WriteRAP template library, which you can find at: http://ushedev.pearsoned.com/writeRAP/index.cfm.

Here you can find available templates, preview them, download them, etc. As more templates are created, we'll work to add them to the library (subject, of course, to any necessary restrictions).

Word Tips

This is a subject you'll see from time to time on this blog. We've all used Microsoft Word on the job and probably at home, too. We know how to do the basics, and some of us are pretty advanced users. But working in WriteRAP puts us in touch with Word in a way we probably never imagined. I hope you never imagined it, anyway - there are much nicer things to imagine.

Many "WriteRAP" questions are actually questions about how to do things in Word. In this recurring blog entry, we'll talk about some of the ways to accomplish some things in Word that you might have been wondering about, and that we hope will make your life with Word easier.

Change the units of measure. This is under your Word > Preferences (Mac) or Tools > Options (Win). Click on the General tab, and at the bottom you will notice a drop-down menu for Measurement Units. Select what you want...and stop having to convert between inches and picas!

Break a Page without Adding Hard Returns. If you add hard returns to make a page break, and then do some editing above it, those line enders will stay with you and move around if you continue to edit. Insert a page break instead. Go to Insert > Break and select Page Break. For WriteRAP, note that if you have a head that always starts a new page, that page break can be made part of the style!

Viewing Invisibles. Of course, if you have put a page break in, that could travel too if the edits are heavy, and sometimes you'll want to get rid of it. In order to do that, you need to be able to see it. For this and other reasons, you will want to be able to see invisible characters in your Word document, and sometimes you'll want to turn off those invisible characters to get a better look at the page. If you have your Standard Toolbar showing, you will see a little paragraph mark as a button (¶), which you can toggle on and off. You can also go in through your Word > Preferences (Mac) or Tools > Options (Win). Click on the View tab, and under Nonprinting Characters (Mac) or Formatting Marks (Win), click on the checkbox next to All. You can also turn on Text Boundaries on either platform from this dialogue box for full visibility.

Download I/O Error Resolution Steps

While working with WriteRAP, you may encounter the Download IO Error as shown in Figure 1. The first thing to know is that you have done nothing wrong. This is a known error and one the WriteRAP team is working on as an extremely high priority to correct.

To summarize the problem:

• When interacting with the download option in My Projects, the user receives an immediate “Download Document IO Error.”
• The error seems to be associated with large file sizes, though it can affect a Word document as small as 3MB.
• Once the error occurs, it cascades across multiple projects and files, and the size of the files affected consistently decreases as the error propagates.
• The file is accessible via the “backdoor” method or preview option (though this is not a workable solution for the customer).
• The only known fix is a system reboot.

On specific files, you can always access the files via the “Backdoor” process, so long as you are the WriteRAP project administrator. The file can then be “compressed” to a smaller file size using a native Word figure compression tool (this often reduces the size to a third of the original). The steps for both are below.

When you encounter this error, please do contact the Corporate Helpdesk.

Backdoor Access

If you are unable to download a document because of this error and cannot wait for the system reboot (or if the reboot does not correct the issue), use these steps to access the current version that is on the server. You must be the WriteRAP project administrator to perform these steps.

1. Log in to the WriteRAP site.
2. Choose WriteRAP Admin.
3. Choose Projects.
4. Find the project for which you need to access the Word file.
5. Click the documents link in the Documents column.
6. In the Action column for the Word document you need to download, click the Download Document icon (see Figure 2).
7. The Document Download window appears (see Figure 3).
8. On the PC, right click the Download Now link to download the document to your desktop (or other designated location). On the Mac, Ctrl+click on the Download Now link to download the document to your desktop (or other designated location).
9. You can now work on the file, use the following Word Compression steps, etc.
10. When you are ready to upload the file, you will need to sign out (but not download) the document via the normal sign-out process and then upload and sign in the document via the normal process.

NOTE: Occasionally, the actions in step 10 may require setting the version ID to the newest. For assistance with that, contact your super user.

Word Compression (PC Only)

You can use Word’s native image compression feature to re-save the document at about 1/3rd its original size and then upload the document into WriteRAP. Please note that this compression does not work all the time in shrinking the overall size of the file.

To perform this task in other documents, make sure that the Picture toolbar is displayed in Word (choose View>Toolbars>Pictures

1. Open the document you want to use this feature on.
2. Click the Compress Images button (see Figure 4). The Compress Pictures dialog box appears (see Figure 5).
3. In Apply To, ensure that All pictures in document is selected.
4. In Change Resolution, ensure that Web/Screen is selected.
5. In Options, make sure both checkboxes are marked.
6. Click OK.
7. A dialog box appears informing you about the irreversibility of this action. Click Apply. The process runs for a few moments, compressing the images.
8. Save the file.

NOTE: If this product is intended for direct to PDF (and especially for print purposes), contact your WriteRAP Product Specialist to confirm that this set of steps is allowable for such products.

WriteRAP and Structured Authoring: Why It Matters

While WriteRAP has many benefits, a key one may be less obvious but is extremely important: Structured authoring. But what is "structured authoring" and why is it important?

To say that "structured authoring" is applying structure to documents doesn't really quite get that answer we need, does it? Essentially, structured authoring is a way of defining a document into chunks of content. For example, in this blog I'm writing now, I can identify two paragraphs, both structured identically as basic body paragraphs (and then a third paragraph below, etc.)

Of course, our products (mainly print books now but moving very quickly to a variety of digital outputs) are more complex: bulleted lists, step lists, notes, questions, answers, exercises, etc. Each of these is definable, and by defining them using Word styles or XML tags provides a structure that creates portability.

This portability answers the "important" question. Think of this: We have a dozen biology books, each with questions and answers for students to answer. We can add structure to that content to indicate they are questions and answers. And now we create a software testing program that captures and delivers questions and answers based on user-inputted criteria. So the user inputs "mitosis" and the program goes and captures only those questions that are defined as being about mitosis. If we had not created structured documents to begin with, this task must be done when inputting the questions and answers into the software program. But if it is done during the authoring process, the program can leverage existing work not only in one particular set of content but across a spectrum of content.

Structured content allows for more efficient transformations of our content into a variety of formats, including but not limited to ePub, Safari, XML transforms, InDesign, Quark, and so on. And getting this content structured is a good, necessary, even vital practice we need to implement. WriteRAP is an important tool in developing that practice.