just write click

I’ve listened to about the first 45 minutes of Clay Shirky’s talk on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.” http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky. Well worth the time spent – especially for my current employer’s product set, which enables organizations to manage their data used to communicate with and connect their members with each other through event planning - all the goals that associations and non-profits strive for every day.

My favorite example, since I’m fascinated with wikis for documentation, has to do with setting up a community of practice faster than ever known in history. On Flickr, a group dedicated to High Dynamic Range photography became a popular destination and learning and collaborating connection.

Before the web, it would have easily taken five to seven years to build up the community - starting from the time when a professional photographer figured out the technique, to the time when ordinary people having the knowledge to accomplish HDR. Using Flickr, it took three months to build a community of practice, because when a photo goes up, people talk with each other, ask how photos were done, and examine the photo examples to learn. In this case, the technology became a platform where people help one another get better.

This group has no commercial incentive whatsoever, as a side note.

The community is as important as the content, a humbling thought for us writers. Just like the Architecture of Participation that Tim O’Reilly talked about in 2004, the participation of community members to generate and test content is as key as the content itself. He even states, “the fundamental architecture of hyperlinking ensures that the value of the web is created by its users.” Google Page Rank further adds to the value by including inbound links in its ranking algorithm.

On The Content Wrangler site there’s a great post asking where does user participation fit in our world? There are plenty of answers, and my interest lies in the case studies that show the amazing power of what results when users actively participate. If you’re interested in user participation and social networking, check out Tom Johnson’s interview with Scott Abel about social networking.

A response to the question, Wiki-to-Help? on the Help Authoring Tool Yahoo Group.

One of our test engineers (and the lead developer of our company wiki) just approached me with the idea of using our company’s internal wiki as the central repository for all company material and using it to generate online help.

I’m following the discussion with interest. I, too, had a similar question asked of me from a developer when we were working in an Agile development environment at BMC Software. In that case, which was at least three years ago, the matchup between the wiki HTML output and the HTML output I needed for our particular help system just wasn’t a good fit. But today, there are better pairings, input to output. I think it’s feasible to go from a wiki to an online help system. It really depends on what output you need, and what you’re willing to do to ensure that the wiki source is worthy of publishing (tested, vetted, trusted, and so on).

I’ve been working on wikis as source for manuals, where the output is a PDF file. In general, yes, wikis are a little clumsy to work in for authoring. For example, some wikitext doesn’t understand that you want a numbered step list with images in between each step and that you want the numbering to continue after each image. So if you’re accustomed to a nice HTML authoring interface, a wiki authoring interface will “feel” like a step about 10 years back in time.

On the more interesting issue, the cultural issue (or the career issue, depending on how you think about it), I think the basis of most arguments against using wikis as source is the fear of loss of authoring control. See wikipatterns.com for the many anti-people patterns that wikis tend to foster if you don’t take steps to avoid them. I especially liked one of the responder’s comments to the list that he didn’t want to become an editor for a wiki. I think he’s right - that “magazine editor” is one of the roles you could take as a wiki-based author. You could also consider your role to be “community director” if you think you can motivate others to contribute to your wiki that will eventually be the help system. There are different roles that will evolve, and it’s up to you to figure out what role might work well in your environment (or if it would work at all). I wrote up a blog post last week about determining where your role as technical writer is most valued in the company, and building from that role.

I believe the cultural or social difficulties are the more difficult hurdle - you have to ensure that the community surrounding a wiki (those that can and will edit) is a group that is willing to work together and collaborate towards the common goal of publishing a customer-facing help system from the wiki. In a SXSW Interactive session titled “Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way” one panelist said that a core group of five editors on a wiki may be the best practice for the size of the group. This type of small number is represented and described in the 90-9-1 theory on wikipatterns.

A solution that might help you wrap your arms around the wiki as source is to set aside only one area or category of the wiki as the articles from which the online help gets generated. Again, without knowing the wiki engine you’re working with and the types of output you’d require, it’s difficult to know if a “wikislice” solution could help in your situation.

Anyway, I could go on and on (and I believe I just did go on and on) about using wikis as source for end-user documentation. I’m pleased that Sarah O’Keefe has just published a white paper titled “Friend or Foe? Web 2.0 in Technical Communication” that should be helpful as we begin to define our roles in each company and how we integrate user-generated content with our own on our product’s web sites.

I hope this information can help you build an argument for or against the use of wikis as source for online help. Please let me know the eventual outcome, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on my response.

Another one of my takeaways from last week’s South By South West Interactive conference is that it makes sense to use the term “social networking” rather than “social media” to describe sites and tools that help you stay connected with others. We’re not all journalists, and the “media” part of the term seems to signify that you want to share media, but in reality, you want to share interests, ideas, and connect with others.

Join the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

There seemed to be an amazing convergence for me last week, when not only did I witness some neat interactions at the conference in person, online I was also having neat interactions with other members of the Content Wranger Community on Ning. I’ve started a Blogging group there as well, and I posed two questions to the group - one is, How do you find time to write blog entries? and the other is, Blog engine as a CMS? Or CMS as blog engine?

Please feel free to add me as your friend, add a comment, join a group, connect with me on The Content Wrangler Community. I’d like to get to know my readers!

Austin’s own STC president Leah Eaton invited the most people to join the community in the 3-day timeframe for a contest, so she gets to choose from a list of conferences to attend. Naturally, I encouraged her to attend DocTrain West where I’ll be moderating the Meet the Bloggers session featuring Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Aaron Davis, Tom Johnson, and Scott Nesbitt.

This book was an easy, fun, read, and seemed especially pertinent after all the immersion into social networking I’ve been doing with SXSW Interactive. The 100-page book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, is aimed at your company’s marketing department for them to read before deep-diving into the social media landscape. Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot share their stories and even their somewhat embarrassing lessons learned, sparing you from the same fate while also encouraging you to start the conversation.

At talk.bmc our entire intent was to start the conversation. So I know how daunting and intimidating it can be, yet you also have to dive in and sit back and listen. It’s not an easy road to walk. But sometimes ROI stands for Risk of Inaction, so eventually you should learn your way around the tools of the trade. I still like Reach Or Influence for the ROI acronym when applied to blogging.

This book gives you specific examples of tools and technology you can use to start the conversation, and also has the proper amount of caution about being genuine and having good intentions. One of my favorite quotes:

The vast majority of products are
ordinary. Worse, most customers
have made their buying decisions
about staple purchases years ago,
and it’s difficult to change their
minds.

So, what to do? Pull off the “online equivalent of a publicity stunt,” create a meme. To me, this is such a daunting task I can’t imagine writing a book about how to do it. But sure enough, these two have the experience and case studies to show for it.

I also liked the “influencer” chapter, describing the rules for interaction with bloggers. Looking at it as a blogger rather than a marketer, it’s good insider information to have. For example, check out this trick! Let’s say someone has a feedburner feed, but they haven’t published that little graphic that shows how many subscribers they have. Just insert /~fc/ into their feedburner URL, and voila, you have the little graphic! Example: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/JustWriteClick. Super secret way to check out your friend’s blogs and see if they have any subscribers to speak of.

Glory be, they like their technical writers as monitors!

Darren has a background as a technical writer, and when the book talks about who is a good candidate for the sometimes time-consuming task of monitoring the blogosphere, I’ll bet it’s Darren who’s giving the nod to the technical writer. My other favorite quote:

On the development side, technical support engineers
or technical writers are often a good choice. They’re good
communicators, tend to have a broad awareness of the
company’s products, and can even reply to basic
support-related posts.

I agree whole heartedly. I think the Agile technical writer that Sarah Maddox describes is precisely the right person to be identifying keywords, get RSS watch lists configured, and read, read, read, and respond when necessary or find someone in our company who can respond correctly.

Wikipedia doesn’t like marketers - tread carefully

And, my personal favorite topic, wikis, is addressed. The book has an excellent section about what to do and what not to do when it comes to the tricky waters of Wikipedia. To me, this section alone is worth the $29 for this book! Solid advice with the proper amount of respect for the community behind Wikipedia.

All in all, nicely done and a great read for marketers and bloggers alike.

I get the greatest blog ideas from my lunch companions lately. This week it was a few former BMC writers. At BMC, the writers have an annual book exchange around the holiday time, and it was so popular we sometimes repeat it mid-year.

At our book exchange, everyone would bring a wrapped book, place it in a pile, then draw a number out of the hat. The person who drew the lowest number would chose from the pile, unwrap the book, read the description, and then the person with the next number would choose to either “steal” the already unwrapped book or take from the pile. The person who drew the highest number would have many unwrapped book titles to choose from.

For a few exchanges in a row, Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell appeared in the book exchange pile, so all four of us at this lunch had read and enjoyed the book very much.

Could you hoard all the information on a topic if you wanted to?

Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell is a wonderful fantastical story about the return of magic to England due to the two people in the title (well, and due to other forces). There are humourous parts, and the fun of the book is that each magician has a very different approach to learning magic again. One hoards all the books about magic. ALL the books. This aspect of information hoarding was especially interesting to us writers at our lunch discussion. Could you even do that in modern day - collect all the books about a certain topic (albeit a narrow focus?) No way.

Another observation is that the cautious one is the one who hoards all the information and only very reluctantly shares it with his reckless pupil. I’m working on a panel discussion on collaboration and I can’t help but remember this book and how fruitless and unsuccessful it was for Mr Norrell to attempt to keep all the books on magic in a single library. The similarity I would draw is how difficult and unhelpful it is to try to write all the information and hoard your topics, never to be remixed into other deliverables.

If the information is hoarded, how is it released to the wild?

Another story that came up in the same week of lunchtime conversations was one from Don Day. He has had a certain camera since he was in high school, and never knew that much about it. He has taken it apart numerous times, and looked for books about the camera, searched on the web with all the identifying text he could find inside the camera, and tried to find any additional information about it, but never found out more.

But! This past year, when someone (I believe the book’s author) uploaded several chapters from a book about specialized vintage cameras to the Internet and it became indexed by Google, Don learned that his old camera that he couldn’t previously identify is worth a couple thousand dollars! It was like the TV show, Antiques Roadshow, had delivered an appraiser to Don through the Internet.

Don’s love of cameras comes full circle in the information sharing sense. Don maintains a wiki about cameras called “Light of Day” and has wonderful photos there. I like this quote from Don’s bio in a wiki entry about the Central Texas DITA User’s Group meeting for October. “I work in high tech, but I love simple things, which is why I feel that an early camera, made of leather and wood, but fitted with a precisely-polished lens, is such a great complement to my own life experience.”

With these two tales of information collection, I hope you see the beauty of share and share alike. Any one else have a great story of information suddenly revealing itself? Or a tale of an information hoarder who met with trouble?

More note taking at sessions at the Quadralay WebWorks Publisher RoundUp. This session is with Stephanie Cottrell Bryant, author of Videoblogging for Dummies. She’s an ePublisher user who embeds video demonstrations of software within online help.

Customers love video embedded in the online help. Time saving for them, and no need to attend a training class. Her customers love it, love it, love it.

Tool kit she uses - Camtasia studio, Framemaker, and WebWorks ePublisher.

Need a script - but you might already have it, like a list of steps in a task.

Annoyance - don’t take your whole desktop while capturing screencasts. “Your desktop icons are like seeing your underwear on a clothesline.”

Also, don’t show the time of the day (like 4:00 AM) that you captured the screens, it’s sort of too much information.

Sizing of about 320 by 240 is about the right size for YouTube. Or 480×360 if you need something slight larger. If you’re delivering the video on a hard drive (installed as part of your product), you can make it even bigger. But for Internet or CHM deployment, keep it small.

Record audio first, then replay the audio while you record the video - the timing will be easier to get synched up.

She likes to use a “highlight click” feature that shows a subtle red circle showing where you click on the screen. She also modifies the cursor so that it’s larger and a yellow color while capturing the screencast.

She “cropped” out the first part of the video where she moved the screen around to the optimal location.

She recommends Flash for video output (.swf file). But if you know people are using Windows, you can make Windows Media files. If you know they’ll only be played back on an iPod, make a QuickTime file. If you want to send these video files to someone else and they don’t have Camtasia, save them as AVI - they’ll be larger files but the recipient will be able to compress them as needed and make another format. Also, any video editing software can edit AVI files.

If you want to use embedded video within an HTML file, don’t use Flash, however.

Goes into Frame, creates relative path to the movies (which is in Files folder within the ePublisher directory system), then generates the HTML using ePublisher.
She uploaded javascript to the WebWorks wiki that writes the embedded video code in on the fly, so that Internet Explorer doesn’t put a popup in front of the user, complaining about the embedded object.

In the javascript call to the video file, she’s adding an extra 10-20 pixels to the height dimension so that the player bar shows up at the bottom.

She uses conditional text in FrameMaker called “Passthrough” for all her javascript code so she can put it right into her FrameMaker file.

I’m listening in on Scott’s somewhat-famous Web 2.0 for technical communicators talk. He has given it 15 times this year already so I’m very excited to hear it here in Austin, TX at the Quadralay WebWorks RoundUp user conference. Here are my notes.

How can writers show they have highly transferable skills? What are the in demand skills?

information architecture, interaction design, modular content creation, localization and translation, document design, standards knowledge= document engineer (read Document Engineering by Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath). How to add value to our careers - by creating human- and machine-readable documents, whatever form they may take.

seeqpod.com - playable search engine. Files that exist and are playable. Does it actually look for keywords within podcasts and let you play the relevant portions of that podcast?
songsza.com

jott.com - what would you like to “jott” - automatic voice recording from your cell phone that can be played back.

tapefailure.com - clips of your users using your website - combine and compare patterns

tagging

del.icio.us - showing his list of tagged bookmarks at del.icio.us/abelsp.

Offered a case study of using for call centers using del.icio.us - have your call center people automatically add tags to items that make sense to them, then the techpubs department can see all the tags, the frequency of the items, and the different vocabulary words used for their bookmarking.

mashups

periodic table of visualization methods
simile.mit.edu/exhibit/ - how you can filter content from a web browser. See the value of visualizing data in more visual ways for the average user.

syndication, subscription

pipes.yahoo.com - visual editor for RSS feeds, bringing them together and combining them.

hosted software (Software as a Service or SaaS)

docs.google.com Google Docs & Spreadsheets (side note - I’ll be publishing my wiki talk from STC Austin using Google Docs’ Presentation tool)
thinkfree.com
zoho.com - documents, spradsheets, projects, notebook, planner, wiki, others

blogs

documentation teams or developers putting end-user doc onto blogs

wikis

interactive voice response company using wiki
parking meter company using wiki
Virgil Griffith created a wiki scanner - salacious edit site - looks for IP addresses and associates them with the company name.
DITA Storm - edit DITA pages on the web.
guided authoring - can developers write role-based documentation if they are guided to do so, with examples and guided templates so they know where content goes.

podcasts

techwritervoices.com

video documentation

viddler.com - allows you to upload videos and annotate them.
See also video jug, expert village, sclipo, 5min, viewdo, teacher tube, youtube howto

social networks

linkedin.com - LinkedIn for Groups - STC and CM Pros will offer a member directory

Get his slides from slideshare.net.

I’ve recently (read:last week) learned that there is active recruiting going on for end-user documentation for One Laptop Per Child. The OLPC project, as it is also known as, is Nicholas Negroponte’s education project that hoped to build a US$100 laptop and take it to developing countries. It turns out, the product they plan to ship this fall with the Give 1 Get 1 program at xogiving.org is closer to US$188. For $400 you get to give one laptop and get another laptop. Wow, what a neat project and what an amazing difference it could make in the life of a child.

So far I am reading like crazy to try to understand the project and its audience, especially to understand the language and translation ramifications. So I have plenty to offer in background reading, such as these items:

The OLPC Wiki - OLPCWiki - wiki.laptop.org/
Laptop: A learning tool created … - www.laptop.org/laptop/
Vision: Children in the … - www.laptop.org/vision/index.shtml
Children: Children actively … - www.laptop.org/children/

FAQ for OLPC - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_FAQ

Especially good to read are the core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and (5) free and open source.

Last night I was even able to emulate the Sugar operating system using a great how-to emulate Sugar and the XO article on IBM’s developerworks site.

Unfortunately, after I created my user name, clicked Next, and then clicked the colors to make my “person” blue with a yellow outline, the emulator went into some reboot loop from which I could not escape. Every subsequent attempt to start up the emulator met with an X in the middle of the emulated screen.

To the OLPC Wiki I went, searched for “emulate” and found “Using QEMU on Windows XP,” and “Emulating the XO/Help and Tips” trying to troubleshoot my problem and see if anyone else had a similar situation. Interestingly, I found the “GUI won’t start” problem in the Sugar instructions wiki page. So I am deleting the original disk image I downloaded and trying to unzip it again.

And… that was it! I’m probably going to move that bit of troubleshooting information over to that Help and Tips page. Here’s the screenshot with proof that I can emulate the Sugar environment on my Dell laptop:

I’m very excited to be a part of this effort. If you’re interested in helping out, and don’t mind a chaotic process with references to wiki information that’s not necessarily the final answer to your questions, and want to translate things like “The units will ship with some kind of human-powered charger that plugs into the DC socket.” into child-friendly minimal task-oriented documentation, please email me using the Contact page.

Adobe has announced a Technical Communication Suite, combining FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, Acrobat 3D, and Flash, available in October 2007 for $1599 or $999 upgrade pricing if you already own one of the tools. This price point is well below what buying those products individually would cost (compare to $3600). I’m about a day late to the flurry of blog posts, as there are many bloggers commenting on this release, but many of them are focusing on the FrameMaker to RoboHelp single sourcing aspect, including the Adobe Technical Communication blog.

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, noted the price temptations, especially for people currently on RoboHelp. I’d just add that the upgrade price is the same price as Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Standard ($999).
Dan Ortega’s message from Astoria appears to be but there’s no enterprise workflow and it’s a desktop solution, meaning, tech writers will still be the only users in a company using FrameMaker. Charles Jeter notes the same lack of collaboration in the suite in a nice wrap up post as well.

Sarah O’Keefe notes that most of her clients are going lighterweight than FrameMaker for their XML solutions.

Bill Swallow (techcommdood) notices that you can only go from Frame to RoboHelp, not back.

While single sourcing is always interesting to me, what I’m curious about are the use cases for Captivate, Acrobat 3D, and Flash, when using this Suite. I’ve used FrameMaker and RoboHelp in the past, but haven’t gone beyond the trial version of Captivate. So I looked at the webinar listing and there are hints at use cases that are an interesting sweet spot for the technical writer who wants to move past the static manual into interactive user assistance - not to mention the technical trainers looking for the correct tool to build interactive demos. Here are some catch phrases I lifted that might be just marketing-speak, but also might speak to where our profession is headed.

• track help system usage
• leverage existing content to create interactive help or performance support
• question randomization
• animation imports from PowerPoint
• do this cool buzzword stuff… without the help of your engineering department

So perhaps a key aspect of what Adobe has heard from tech writers all over is, we want to do cool stuff, but we’re not getting the resources we need to program the cool stuff.

And indeed, the webinar folks seem to want to help define where we’re headed and how we’ll get there. To quote from the intro paragraph, “What does this mean for technical communicators, instructional designers and eLearning professional today and tomorrow?” As go the toolset, so goes the career? I suppose that the skill demand certainly shapes what you learn as a technical communicator in order to stay employable. Does your software toolset make you do your job a certain way?

I thought I’d continue posting about my experience with Author IT since my initial review of AuthorIT. This past month I’ve been exploring ways to help out with the Author IT nuts and bolts, doing maintenance-type and infrastructure tasks such as changing the on-screen style formatting and revising a book template.

I’ve also been learning more about what is involved with the overall tasks of maintaining single source with nearly 20,000 objects in your library. Objects can be topics or books or hyperlinks or index entries or graphics or… many other items, so I’ll have to dig deeper to get a sense of how many topic objects we deal with daily. Ah, here we go - do an Advanced unqualified search filtered for results Of type “Topic Object” and then select the ones not marked “Obsolete” or “Orphaned” (meaning not used in a book object) and the answer is, we have over 7,000 topic objects in our library.

I maintain that the learning curve is steep but I’m fortunate (or sometimes unfortunate) that I’m approaching these tasks with an idea of how I think it might work. Plus I have an Author IT expert sitting in the office next to me who still answers my IMs when I ask Author IT questions. (Thanks, Mary!)

Changing the state

It is still taking me a while to get accustomed to the workflow that requires that I change the state of an object before making edits to it. If the topic I want to edit isn’t in a writeable state, then I can’t make my edits until I locate the object so I can right-click it to change the state. Maybe I’m missing some shortcut to how to change the state while editing a topic’s text. I’ll have to poke around the tabs a while. It’s more likely that I need to make a shift in my workflow and remember to select the topic objects I want to edit, change the state, and then begin the edits.

Search mechanisms

My understanding is that there are two basic search mechanisms and both are rather underpowered for the amount of legacy information we have stored. (I’ll have to get a topic count to give real numbers here.) The first search mechanism is searching the entire collection of topics and books and sub books. The Advanced Search checkbox is always checked in my environment.

The second search mechanism is on the actual text within topics - you can search for text within a topic, within a book, or within the entire library. This mechanism is found from the Edit > Find menu command in AuthorIT Enterprise Edition.

What I’ve found recently, however, is that you cannot replace formatting on the found items. This limitation means that you could have semantically tagged items that are not able to be retagged. For example, if you had tagged all your menu items as “menucascade” but needed to change the tagging to “breadcrumbnav” you would have to export the topics to an XML editor and do search and replace there. I don’t yet know how to batch export say thousands of topics to do this search and replace to get the semantic tagging you wanted. This analysis and potential workaround is based on searching within the Author-it Yahoo Group’s messages, so perhaps there is another way to search for text and formatting and change both the text and the formatting but I haven’t found it yet.

Even with these two search mechanisms at our disposal, we find it easier to use a Google search tool on our external database at docs.imis.com, then right-click on the HTML page to get the topic ID, then use that topic ID to search the AIT object database.

Author IT Yahoo Group

Now, I just went through the Yahoo Group messages again to learn more about the searches in AIT, and I really do like the community there. People are very helpful and still maintain a nice sense of humor and goodwill. That’s an important aspect of any tool selection I think. Anyway, there is a way to search within a set of found items, and that is to do a Search using the Search tab first, then press Ctrl+A to select all topics found that match the search criteria, and then do the Find and Replace command on the selected topics. That search also revealed a potential limitation of AIT’s inability to find period space space and replace it with period space (explanation of why period space is correct, because The PC Is Not A Typewriter).

A third search mechanism that we could make use of but that doesn’t yet exist would be the ability to search within a folder. We can use the trick mentioned above where you select all the objects in a folder then do a Find. A Folder in AIT is just a representation of the objects in a collection within a folder in the CMS of AIT (sorry, too many acronyms to qualify as a real explanation, but it’s basically another view of the database but not searchable within each Folder). But that’s a find on text, not a find on objects or metadata on those objects.

Variables to substitute text values

I find that the variable mechanism is a little bit clumsy. Variables are simply text enclosed in angle brackets <substitutethisforthat>. So you still have to do a search and replace for text when you want to choose a different variable name. If you use angle brackets in your documentation, AIT has to be told specially that you meant to do that and that those should not be resolved to a variable name. So, if you really want angle brackets to appear as angle brackets and not resolve to a variable, you have to use the HTML trick of ampersand lt semicolon.

Running AIT publishing from the command line

One nice feature is the publishing engine’s batch processing that will even output the commands for you so that you can include it in a batch process. We found that the outputs are always placed within the users folder that is logged in to AIT, despite using a documented command line parameter where you feed in a user and password for running the batch processing. Mary found a nice workaround where she just copies the files she needs out of another folder (the _Output folder in our environment), but it seems like a waste of disk space to me to have a second copy of output in each user’s folder. We can do some cleanup using the batch files to ensure that disk space is freed up, however.

Magical price point

Let’s face it, since it’s in the four figures for a seat license, Author IT is a relatively inexpensive all-in-one single sourcing tool that has both a straightforward editor and a content management system. A small techpubs department looks pretty darn good when they can deliver manuals and help as part of an automated build in a lights-off no-touch system. And the savings in translation costs when you single source are unmatched.

Where AIT “feels” inexpensive though, is in the slightly outdated interface (why can’t it remember the window size after being shut down?), somewhat underpowered search methods, and so far, I just can’t shake the general feeling that you’re not really owning or editing “source” files but rather some Word-like representation of the source.

Still, it works wonders and lets our small techpubs department output some high-quality professional content, more content than possible without a single-sourcing tool. So I’ll face the learning curve and continue to climb it.