WebWorks Publisher 2003 for Word
Summary | Starting a project | Customisation and tweaking | Other points
In this final part of the review, I'd like to make some comments about a variety of unrelated issues.
Support for accessibility
Like most recent authoring tools, Publisher helps authors—to a degree—to produce accessible content. However, this assistance is only available for five output formats that support accessibility. If you generate one of these formats, you can set Publisher to make a limited number of checks on your work. For example, Publisher can check whether you have provided an ALT attribute for every image. Quadralay claims that Publisher currently provides better support for accessibility than comparible tools.
Bugs and difficulties
Although I found Publisher an impressive application, I have a few negative remarks to make about both the software. However, before making my criticisms, I'd like to remind you that I was working with an evaluation version; the software problems I identified probably don't exist in the commercial version.
When using the New Project Wizard, I encountered a minor bug in step 3 (see the picture in the previous Summary section). There was no vertical scroll bar on the list of styles even though the list was too long to show all entries without scrolling and the window was not resizable. To overcome this problem is easy enough; I selected one style and used the down-arrow key to move down the list. I also experienced the same problem with the style list in the Project Mappings dialog box.
I could not open a Publisher project by choosing File > Open. No Open dialog box appeared. I was surprised to find such an obvious bug, even in evaluation software. Fortunately, I could open projects from Windows Explorer.
Publisher's online help
Like any self-respecting technical author, I took the time to investigate Publisher's substantial quantity of online help, which is presented in the WebWorks Help 4.0 format. It is mostly clear and accurate, but I found the information unsatisfactory in certain of areas. If I have noted several negative points below, you should not take this to be damning criticism of Quadralay's authors. Certain topics answered my questions admirably. However, I also had my moments of frustration.
Although the help was generally clear on specific details, it didn't assist me to see the bigger picture. I found the introductory and concepts topics rather weak. For example, I found that the information on the Publisher macro language very hard to absorb. Although not a programmer, I have done some coding with various languages. Relying on just the help, I really struggled to get started with macros.
I would have liked to see more explanation about Publisher's relationship with Word. Which Word features does Publisher recognise? Which does it ignore? And which are might prove problematic? I found pieces of information scattered throughout topics, but I would have liked a comprehensive explanation in one place. By experimenting I found, for example, that the way Publisher processes graphics is quite complex. Armed with my discoveries, I searched help for some relevant explanation, but I found nothing useful.
In a few places, I would have liked more precise instructions. Topics about keyword lists showed an example of three words separated by commas but no spaces. This is not enough to stop some readers—I am guilty here—trying to use spaces to improve the readability of the list. This is not such a stupid mistake considering that spaces are permitted in, for example, keyword lists in HTML META elements. In the Publisher help, I would have preferred to see an explicit instruction to exclude spaces.
A final minor point: several help topics mentioned Publisher 6.0 or 7.0—these are references to earlier releases of the Framemaker product. If this clearly irrelevant information has been left in the help system, I wonder whether other, less obviously wrong information, is also present. It is rather ironic to find this kind of mistake in the help for a tool that is supposed to make single-source publishing reliable and easy to control.
Import utility
Compared to Publisher, the Import Utility is a light-weight download—just 8626 KB for the evaluation copy. This is a relatively simple tool, and I only investigated it briefly. First, I converted RoboHTML projects and compiled HTML Help files (.CHM) to Word documents using the Import Utility's default settings. Then I converted to Word files to compiled HTML Help with Publisher.
The content of my new help files seemed well-preserved when I compared them to the originals. (I am not totally sure because the evaluation copy scrambles some of the text to discourage evaluators from using it for real work.) The layout of the new help files would have resembled the original files more if I had taken time to modify the conversion template.
Summary | Starting a project | Customisation and tweaking | Other points (top)
Copyright © 2003 Stephen P. Reynolds. All rights reserved.
|