smurphy – Page 15 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Disappearing Text in PDFs – Part 3

Because I disable commenting on posts a short while after publication (due to insane quantities of spam), this comment was left by Ryan Bernard on an unrelated post, but it’s potentially useful, so bears getting a post of its own:

I read you posts about tables going blank in FrameMaker. The solutions you presented did not work for me. What worked was to use File > Save As PDF and when you get the PDF properties dialog, turn off “Tagged PDFs” settings. I believe this is the little mischief maker we have all been looking for… It worked for me in multiple instances, without fiddling with anything else. I believe Tagging is used for disability presentation or whatever it’s called. Some applications/clients may require that, but most don’t in my experience.

Other possible solutions to this problem are described in these posts:

Downloadables

I quite enjoy whiling away the odd bit of free time creating my own templates, page layouts, and the like. It’s a side effect of the whole tech comms thing. But an odd bit of free time doesn’t tend to coincide with an urgent need for a printable resource.

The internet, though, is a mad place of infinite wonder and abundent with lovely printables/downloadables that someone else has needed, created, and been gracious enough to share.

Some examples below – some of which I’ve used, and some I’ve just found now to illustrate a point! 🙂

Stuck for a piece of graph paper – bog standard, or wildly unusual – don’t have time to go visit a stationers, and lack the patience to spend your evening trying to draw your own? A quick search for “free downloadable graph paper” should point you at sites like incompetech.com/graphpaper/.
Kids learning to write and need extra sheets from those weird copy books with the extra lines showing you were the rising and falling bits of their letters should end? Try printablepaper.net/category/penmanship
(I did actually spend too much time with Excel trying to reinvent the wheel before finding that one!)
How about handwriting sheets with letters/words ready to trace? How about handwritingworksheets.com or worksheetworks.com/english/writing/handwriting.html. Both of these sites will even let you specify what practice text you want on the sheet.
And it doesn’t have to be all about academic stuff. How about a printable garden planner, so that you can make the most of your outside space? Check out frugalliving.about.com/od/gardening/ss/Printable-Garden-Notebook.htm
Or tracking household stuff, like family schedules, memberships/subscriptions, meal plans, and the like. There are sites like thenesteffect.com/p/free-printables.html.

The resources out there really are endless. Many are free, some ask for a contribution if you find them useful, and if you go looking you can find paid for offerings too – often, but not always, of a superior quality.

If you’ve stumbled across a gem the world deserves to know about, do give it a shout out in the comments.

A Stitch in Time…

This user manual came with some hardware Dave bought a few years ago.

A slim 20 page volume, It included 3 erratum slips and an extra chapter as inserts — 5 pages in total. All, I suspect, carefully added at the correct locations in the original manual by hand.

Bad Tech Writing – #1

This excerpt from the manual that came with our fridge freezer is a great example of why you should never click Accept All on documentation reviews. (See the last line.)

Quick Text Generation in Word

Here’s a trick that comes in useful if, say, you have a blank Word doc you want to populate quickly to check out formatting and layout. A simple command will dump a block of sample text into your Word doc. You just type it in to the main document and press Return, no opening special dialogs or VB windows or anything.

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