MadCap Releases New Product Versions (Fri, 03 Oct 2008)

MadCap has released version 4 of its Flare Help Authoring Tool, along with new products Blaze and X-Edit. Flare version 4 features a new reporting engine that show the health and status of a project, supports new publishing formats including direct to PDF, XPS, XHTML, and AIR, and has an improved print publishing engine. MadCap Blaze is a topic-based, enterprise print publishing tool, which MadCap says has the ease of Microsoft Word with the power of Adobe FrameMaker. MadCap X-Edit is an editing tool that works with Flare and Blaze projects, but aimed at occasional contributors. X-Edit aims to improves documentation workflows by allowing subject matter experts to seamlessly review and provide content alongside a documentation team using Flare or Blaze.

CHM Viewer for Linux (Fri, 12 Sep 2008)

xCHM is an open source viewer for Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files. It shows the Table of Contents tree in a tri-pane window arrangement, let's the user print the current topic, and provides the normal history (back and forward) functionality. It allows the user to change text sizes and fonts, and to search for text in all the pages of the file or in the pages' titles. xCHM is released as an Ubuntu package.

STC Australia Chapter Competitions (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

STC Australia is hosting competitions in three categories: technical publications, technical art, and online communication. Entries of an appropriate standard are entered in the STC International Competition, and Australian entries have won awards in this competition in past years. In last year's competition, ASIC received a distinguished award for one entry and an excellence award for the other. Entries close on 31 October 2008. Contact Monica Allen at competitions@stc-aus.org.au for details.