Shortcuts for the Word template styles not working

Word has been doing some crazy things with the keyboard shortcuts for the styles. I’ve set the keyboard shortcuts up at least 3 times now, and it keeps clearing them in a seemingly random way. One day the style shortcuts are there, then the next they’re all GONE! So.. you reset them… save the template.. and it’s good for another day or two but then they just vanish again!

It’s quite frustrating and so far I haven’t found out why it’s happening.. I’ll have to look in to it more but time is scarce.

So at this point, we’ll have to do without the keyboard shortcuts.. which is a real shame because it makes the workflow … flow! I’ll post a solution if I ever find one!

Problems with importing to InDesign

Until yesterday the importing from Word to InDesign was going fairly well. One new problem is possibly related to MathType; the other, problems associated with trying to work between Word 2004 on the MAC, Word 2007 on the PC, docx and doc.

The equations from MathType transfer fine, it’s just the layout that goes crazy. Some equations seem to be layed out inside tables (so there’s some spots that have nested tables) – these seem to be completely ignored when I import to InDesign, and a nicely positioned equation comes out as a list of things half a page long!

So far I haven’t figured out what the best approach will be here. I’ve seen that a lot of people actually export EPS files from MathType and then separately place them in InDesign. While that would probably give better quality it seems like a huge stuff around.

The other issue I’m having is WORD! When I take a DOC file (created in Word 2007 in compatibility mode), edit it on my MAC with office 2004, then try and open it again on the PC (Word 07 again), word completely crashes!

This could be bad news, unless it’s just a glitch with my setup. We’ll have some authors using the MAC version of word, and our copy editors will be using the PC version of 2007. I will have to do some more testing to find out what is happening. I’m also wondering how everything will go when we get Office 2008 on the MAC..

Another small problem I have is that InDesign on the MAC crashes when I try to import a docx file; I’ve read that InDesign (CS3) will take docx files but perhaps not on the MAC, I’ll have to test on the PC.

Update on the Second Life Island

Machinima 1 is now complete and we’re working on Machinima 2 already!  We’ll soon be making the Machinima 1 viewable in-world at Hird and Co’s office meeting room, and I’m sure we’ll follow through and do that for Machinima 2 when it’s complete.

The next step for the island will be to make it more of an interactive environment.  We’ll be picking up the books on Second Life scripting and getting stuck in to it.  Currently it’s just an island with a few buildings and things around, there’s no information what-so-ever about what we’re doing or what’s what!

The first task on the list will be to present visitors with a clickable teleport system, which takes the users to various points of interest on the island.  For example, if someone wants to see what we’re doing with the auditing machinima, they can click the sign, teleport to a viewing platform overlooking the entire set.  On this platform they’ll find various bits of information (like where to find the Machinima video in Hird & Co’s office) and so on.  I’ll also work on doing up some graphical icons to use as in-world identifiers for help or information (icons which of course will match all of our current work with the In-Design based study guides (last post)).

We’ll post info on the progress of the teleporting system, as well as any other cool things we’re doing as we go along!

From Word to InDesign – CQU Study Guides

Semester 1 this year will showcase a new trail for learning material at CQU. By using a combination of MS Word and Adobe InDesign, we’ve created a process which allows us to greatly improve the look and feel of the study a in a semi-automated and timely manner.

The new process continues to allow authoring of course materials in Word, which seems to be the most familiar and user-friendly application for academic authors. It also means less change at the authoring level, which is a good thing.

InDesign was chosen for a few reasons. It’s an industry standard for creating magazine and book layouts and much more. It encompasses too many features to name, some of the most handy are: the extensive use of styles (not just paragraph and character styles, but also table styles, cell styles and object styles). It has great functionality with the Adobe PDF format; automatic TOC creation; easy to create and use templates for ‘official layouts’; … the list goes on

The key in the new process are the styles. When the styles are used correctly in Word (authors simply download our Word template which has the correct styles in it), (incorrect use is usually picked up in a routine copy edit), the styles in the word document are “mapped” to the styles in the InDesign template. So upon a simple and quick import, almost all of the InDesign formatting is automated.

All that remains are some manual table formatting, which is quite quick and easy thanks to the table styles (just select the table and apply the style!); as well as the object styles for inserting any icons (simply place the icon, apply the style and all the placement is done!).

We’re still learning as we go, but so far the process looks really promising. It will be interesting to see how the new version of word will change this process, if at all.Some of the simple problems we’ve encountered so far include:

• Can’t export a tagged PDF from an InDesign book file. There seems to be a huge glitch and InDesign crashes every time. We will have to try and find a work-around for this at some point, because the tagging allows the PDF to be more accessible for screen-readers etc. At the same time, we want to still export the entire book rather than the individual document files because this way we can retain the auto-generated hyperlinks in the TOC..
• Change any part of the main document and you have to do an update to the TOC.. if you don’t the hyperlinks can get completely ruined.

For the future, some of the things we may want to look at:

• Adobe InDesign Server – perhaps this could help us; hosting our templates in a central location; and it may even help us further automate the process in ways we haven’t thought of yet.. not sure
• XML – InDesign imports and exports XML; the new version of word also produced XML based file formats. Could this allow us to work the two formats together in an even more automated way? It’d be worth looking at in more detail when time allows. At the least, this may mean some cool things for web-based study guide creation.. variable data printing and who knows what else.

We’re really getting somewhere!

The machinima is going great – we’ve finished all the shooting for the entire machinima, and have also decided to do another machinima just in time for T1. The only stuff that remains for machinima 1 is the video recording, and editing in iMovie (easy!). I’ll post a blog note when we’re almost finished and put up a url for viewing.

We’re going to try something new and fun with machinima 2 – a video within a video. We’ll need to create a scene that replicates a business meeting with a projector screen; basically we’ll be adding some video created with camtasia to an in-world screen, which will play the video upon the command of an avatar. So, there’ll be no need for adding in the camtasia footage separately post-production, it’ll all be done swiftly within the second life space – and it should look much more impressive!

All of the recent work on the project is running really smoothly and we’re all very happy with the result so far, it’ll be rewarding to see it up and going once it’s complete.

Textures and Objects

The tools for content creation (discussed last post) made creating content fairly easy, so there’s not really an issue for “how”; Textures and objects were a little different however.

Our problem was, we needed to have at least 4 locations, or “sets” to produce the scenes of our machinima – but what were we going to create the sets with?  Sure you can create structures from scratch, but one, that’s more time consuming, and two, then you might also need to create your own textures if you go this way.

Second life comes with some textures in your avatar library, but lets face it there’s not much there and more often then not you need something more specific.  There’s also the other negative aspect that each texture you upload costs you money!  No refunds if you make a mistake with your texture either.

There’s lots of options of course, you can just buy (yes BUY as in pay for) pre-made objects from sites like SL Exchange.  Or if you’re lucky you’ll find some free ones.

Luckily there are also some locations that offer completely free objects / textures and much more.  This was really great for us, and it turns out that most of the sets on our island are created using objects from places like this freebie store. There’s also other resources out there in SL worth checking out; this Design Center is a very nice showcase and also has some tips and tricks for authoring in SL.  For a tutorial on texturing and more, here’s another good one, an in world texture tutorial. </p

CQU’s Island in Second Life

At the start of this month we got our Island set up. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building the scenes needed by our machinima for the auditing course.

The building tools are quite good, and it has been surprisingly quick and easy so far to set up the scenes. I’ll post some screen shots of the work here somewhere, soon..

Of course the tools have their limitations, one of the most annoying is that you can’t seem to create objects that have more than 10 meters length on any axis. So for example, to create the road throughout our scene, I had to connect 23 slabs of 10×10, and that doesn’t count the foot path!

My other main annoyance is that aligning objects perfectly is more complicated than needed. Sure, it’s still fairly easy, but from working with graphic design tools every day that have awesome alignment tools I can see what the Second Life authoring environment is missing. For starters, the anchor point of each object is in the middle (of each axis); you can’t change this anchor point, if you could it’d be even easier!

Here’s an example of what I mean; to align two slabs of road, there’s no auto-align tools, so you have to take the x position of the first object for example, add or subtract half of each slabs width on that axis to get the centre point of the second object.. if you get my drift. Why bother aligning objects perfectly? Well, it’s a must – you get some bad graphic glitches if objects are overlapping, textures flicker and behave strangely.

A summary

If you could choose the object’s anchor point, and have better align and distribution tools, creating more complicated structures would be a lot easier and quicker.Still; all up the editing tools are more than reasonable, and to do simple things it’s quite easy and timely.

Pre-made objects and textures?

That’s another story completely.