KVR Audio

Zaphod (giancarlo) · Post by **Zaphod (giancarlo)** » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:06 pm

Illustrator, indesign, Photoshop

khanyz · Post by **khanyz** » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:24 pm

I forgot to mention my vector stuff. I switched to Xara years ago and have stuck with it, though I have scripts for some SVG things like borders/frames etc. I diagram/flowchart using SmartDraw as Visio became cumbersome.

As you might have guessed, I'm a UNIX guy originally, so I usually see all tasks as scripts, even GUI based ones.

JCJR · Post by **JCJR** » Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:01 pm

stian wrote:We use Help & Manual: http://www.helpandmanual.com/
Very nifty tool if you target multiple documentation formats and platforms.

Best,
Stian

Help and Manual looks nice!

Ivan_C · Post by **Ivan_C** » Thu Apr 27, 2017 6:34 am

Help and Manual looks interesting indeed !

By the way, I'm using great and cheap Photoshop/Illustrator replacements called Affinity Photo and Designer, and Affinity is working on their own InDesign nowadays

khanyz · Post by **khanyz** » Thu Apr 27, 2017 6:56 am

Ivan_C wrote:By the way, I'm using great and cheap Photoshop/Illustrator replacements called Affinity Photo and Designer, and Affinity is working on their own InDesign nowadays

I've been meaning to try it. I have old versions of Serif Page/Photo/Draw Plus which I only used briefly, for a client who used them in-house. Generally I thought Serif was a good budget option but laborious to use. Hopefully Affinity has better workflow.

For me, Xara had the quickest and simplest workflow, with fast access to each tool and ability to enter values (rather than dragging the mouse). It has become bloated as more photo functions have been intergrated so I'd like something that was leaner.

JCJR · Post by **JCJR** » Thu Apr 27, 2017 9:02 pm

Dang, this thread might cost me some money.

Will try the affinity designer demo. Looks promising and the licensing requirements appear quite tolerable. Hopefully the workflow is "better-simpler" than Illustrator. Illustrator is quite powerful but the times I've used it, didn't practice long enough to acquire skill. Non-expert operation seemed pulling teeth forever just to draw a simple diagram and get the desired appearance. Maybe modern versions of Illustrator are better in that regard, dunno.

Didn't check the licensing restrictions on Help and Office yet. H&O is somewhat expensive for a retired non-business expense that can't be written off. There are "just enough" missing features in the cheap version, that the pro version would probably be required. Otherwise with the cheap version, eventually I'd probably need to do something that the cheap version won't do.

Stian, a question if you know offhand-- I'm not expert on modern html usage and ignorant of modern scripting options. The scripting which Help and Manual uses to display formatted web pages-- Is the scripting server-side or client-side? In other words, could I upload a stack of H & M generated pages and get the visual/interactive behavior without enabling any kind of scripting support on my server?

A few years ago my personal "website that time forgot" was hacked via a security hole in an old simple script. I disabled all server-side scripting because I don't have time/patience to be a vigilant security policeman on a neglected hobby site. It would be nice to make prettier looking and behaving pages if I could do so without letting any scripts or webapps run on my server. But if it requires server-side scripts or apps, I can live without it.

Thanks!

stian · Post by **stian** » Fri Apr 28, 2017 7:37 am

JCJR wrote: Stian, a question if you know offhand-- I'm not expert on modern html usage and ignorant of modern scripting options. The scripting which Help and Manual uses to display formatted web pages-- Is the scripting server-side or client-side? In other words, could I upload a stack of H & M generated pages and get the visual/interactive behavior without enabling any kind of scripting support on my server?

It's all running locally and you can export the help / manual to a variety of formats such as CHM, PDF, HTML, etc. You'll have to handle deployment yourself. The internal format is XML based, but there's usually no need to look at the XML code. We always use the WYSIWYG editor.

Best,
Stian

khanyz · Post by **khanyz** » Fri Apr 28, 2017 8:01 pm

Rather coincidentally, I just started up Corel Paint Shop Pro X6 and it offered me X9 Ultimate (Full) for £12.99

. It even came with some nice freebies.

How can I give Serif a hint?

Ivan_C · Post by **Ivan_C** » Tue May 02, 2017 12:46 pm

It's too bad I have not found applications allowing to write Markdown text and to export to PDF with the ability to put page breaks, table of contents, footers. The closest one to this was Typora. I would love to be able to write a manual with this, but I think I'm finally going back to Word with templates

lorcan · Post by **lorcan** » Tue May 02, 2017 1:06 pm

It's too bad I have not found applications allowing to write Markdown text and to export to PDF with the ability to put page breaks, table of contents, footers.

Did you check Asciidoctor ? It's exactly that.

Miles1981 · Post by **Miles1981** » Tue May 02, 2017 1:23 pm

Ivan_C wrote:It's too bad I have not found applications allowing to write Markdown text and to export to PDF with the ability to put page breaks, table of contents, footers. The closest one to this was Typora. I would love to be able to write a manual with this, but I think I'm finally going back to Word with templates

You can write one in Python and share it with the community :p I would welcome it

Miles1981 · Post by **Miles1981** » Tue May 02, 2017 1:31 pm

lorcan wrote:
It's too bad I have not found applications allowing to write Markdown text and to export to PDF with the ability to put page breaks, table of contents, footers.
Did you check Asciidoctor ? It's exactly that.

Seems like the official implementation doesn't have a pdf backend anymore?

lorcan · Post by **lorcan** » Tue May 02, 2017 1:34 pm

Seems like the official implementation doesn't have a pdf backend anymore?

Sure it does !
https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf
http://asciidoctor.org/docs/render-docu ... put-format

On thing I like about it is that you can also output clean html/css and make your docs available online, such as https://www.lmdsp.com/products/superchord/manual/

Harry_HH · Post by **Harry_HH** » Tue May 02, 2017 1:35 pm

This comment is a bit out of the topic, but I wish developers who write manuals, read this.

Firstly, I think many present developers neglegt the manual.

As a end user, for me the most important points concerning the manual are:

- easy and quick move to the manual while using the plugin, the format is not the main point
- not just a link to the internet, but a real dedicated manual
- table of contents -hyperlinked
- INDEX !!! which covers all the key words, hyperlinked
- graphs and pictures are great add-on
- possible links to the video tutorials

Thank you.

Ivan_C · Post by **Ivan_C** » Tue May 02, 2017 1:44 pm

Indeed Asciidoctor looks cool, but I remember the last time I tried to install Ruby on my main Windows 8.1 computer

Anyway I'm probably going to use Linux more often than before in VirtualBox, maybe I'll see if I can test Asciidoctor there

Little survey about software manuals