A Living Text

Well, the long-awaited release of the updated version of Buzzword is here! Buzzword is now integrated into what is called Acrobat.com, something that exits both online and as an app on your desktop - Mac or PC. Acrobat.com integrates with Share, for PDF and file sharing, Create PDF, which does what the name implies, Meet, which allows net meetings. It is now possible to upload and share files, have net meetings, and work in a sophisticated web processing environment - all for free.

I’m not sure about what all is new in Buzzword, but I do see that export to PDF is now enabled. I imported a Word document as an experiment, and it worked flawlessly. You can export to the formats shown below:

There are lots of things that we still need to see, for example:

Supporting the ODF format;

Supporting paragraph styles;

Supporting XML import-export;

Something like Lovely Charts for Acrobat.com;

Integrating Photoshop Express and other similar apps in the suite.

But I think we are headed towards seeing all of those things. And right now, this is an awesome set of apps that is free and beautiful. I would imagine that heads are turning in Redmond, and that they can see the end of their business model on the horizon. Granted, Office can do tons of things that Acrobat.com cannot do right now, but at the basic level of functionality that most people use word processors for, Buzzword is quickly ramping up to smash Word.

It was getting to the point where I wouldn’t use Google Docs anymore for much of anything. This was due to the advent of Buzzword and my love for it. But Google has taken a small step forward with the advent of a fixed-width page view inside Google Docs. It makes for a bit better interface, and restores some usefulness to G Docs.

Some time ago, I was asked a few questions about what would be valuable to learn about business writing. These were my thoughts:

Think about what types of business writing are needed and frequently encountered in the workplace. What are expectations or standards of quality that most companies expect?  

The most obvious and ubiquitous form of communication now is e-mail. It is crucial to internal and external presentation that thought is given to font choice, color choice, length, and tone. Using fonts like Comic Sans or pink type in business communication can communicate an unprofessional demeanor.
I belive that almost every American buisness today uses PowerPoint and Excel heavily. It is very helpful for writers to understand how to effectively construct charts and PowerPoint presentations that are not cluttered and communicate effectively. I would refer learners to the works of Edward Tufte, particularly on avoiding ‘chart junk’ and on some of the potential pitfalls of PowerPoint.

What writing skills would businesses like people to acquire?  

Essential grammar skills remain foundational to all communication. Beyond that the way we write is changing from long, linear documents to ‘chunks’ of information that can be swapped in and out of different documents. Writing in this type of module fashion vs. a linear fashion can be difficult to excel at. Blogs are catching on in some sectors of the marketing world, and I think viewing examples of corporate blogs that communiate well - and how to author such blogs - would be beneficial.

What types of documents would you classify under business writing? Resumes? Press Releases? Letters/Memos? Reports? Announcements? Advertisements?, etc  

All of the above, and I would add: marketing datasheets, user manuals, online help files, corporate blogs, and web page content.

Well, OpenOffice has extensions for:

Latex

Google Docs

Unbeknownst to me, Microsoft also has a book search function, like Google’s Books that I have grown to love:

Live Search Books

You have probably already heard about Adobe’s free Photoshop roll-out last week. I see big things coming there. Integrating BuzzWord, Share, Photoshop and more could make for a really cool set of apps. I think we will see great things from BuzzWord this year, including a desktop version, easy export to PDF as text, and the beginnings of templates, styles, and PhotoShop integration.

I think that 2007 was a watershed year for the end of the Microsoft Office empire. There are so many quality tools out there now that provide viable alternatives to Office, that it is no longer necessary to have Office. The NY Times talked about it recently. The only gates to the revolution are the institutional acceptance of Office, which demands that papers and documents at schools and businesses be turned in using Word, Excel, etc. Thus, the issue of interoperability is the key ~ can documents be saved into .doc format, for example, and look ok? To me, PDF solves this issue, but professors and managers don’t all have, or know how to use, Acrobat Professional, and so the need for word processors continues.

Let me review some of the tools that I use that are free, and in some cases more aesthetically pleasing than Office.

1. Buzzword. I can’t say enough about Buzzword, I just love it. Buzzword saves to .doc, and .docx amongst other formats. It doesn’t save to PDF yet, but should soon. The interface is elegant, the font choices, although limited, are very nice, and best of all, it’s free.

2. Adobe Share. Share allows you to upload PDFs and share them with people, or embed them.

3. Google Apps. Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Presentation give you the free ability to do a lot of what Office does. I’m not wild about the Google interface, it looks a little cartoonish and doesn’t do all the things that Word does by a long stretch. It does export to Word, Open Office, and PDF. Again, it’s free.

4. Lovely Charts. Sort of a Visio alternative, I just signed up so I’m not sure about it yet. But I think the interface is clean (built on Flash of course). Some day perhaps it will export to Visio, but who cares? It’s an alternative.

5. OpenOffice. If you want to download a large Office alternative you can use OO. It is bulky, and not accessible online like Buzzword, but it does a lot.

6. IBM Lotus Symphony. This group of tools should be available for Macs this year, right now it is only on PCs. It’s sort of slow and a resource hog, but it gets the job done like Word does.

With all of that said, I have been using Office 2007 at work recently, and I really like it. But I wouldn’t want to pay for it at home. Microsoft ought to get radical and make it free, then we would see a true revolution. I’m also using iWork 08 at home, and I love, love, love Pages. So there are a lot of options out there, but I think we are living through the end of the Microsoft hegemony.

There are some free fonts available for download here. Click Typefaces > For Free. Although I like the free ones, I like others more. Anziano is a really gorgeous font, and I wish I could afford it. I’m putting the picture of Anziano type below:

As I have mentioned before, Adobe FrameMaker 8 was crashing just about every time I tried to save a file to PDF. It was an intermittent problem, and it was driving me beserk as I am doing all of my newer work using Frame and InDesign. But lo and behold a kind soul had provided me with relief. It turns out that most, if not all, of the problems are from the fntcache.dat file on the C drive. To fix this problem, do the following:

Open Notepad. Enter this text in Notepad:

del c:\windows\system32\fntcache.dat
shutdown -s

Save the file as a .bat file on your desktop. Mine is called “delfontcache.bat” When you run this .bat file, it deletes the fntcache and shuts your PC down. The result is that FrameMaker doesn’t crash any more. So before you shut down your PC (every time), run this .bat file to clear out the fntcache and shut down for you - problem solved.

How do you define what a sentence is? The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language says:

The sentence is notoriously difficult to define; numerous definitions have been offered and found wanting. The classical definition, that a sentence expresses a complete thought, dates from the first Western treatise on grammar, by Dionysius Thrax (c. 100 BC), whose interest lay primarily in analysing, using, and teaching written Greek. This traditional notional definition, however, only solves the problem by transferring it: how does one define a complete thought? Linguists and anthropologists in the 19-20C, trained in the Greco-Latin grammatical tradition and faced with the analysis of previously unwritten Amerindian languages, have often noted how difficult it is to establish the boundaries between what might be sentences in some of those languages. Because of this, the sentence as understood in the Western linguistic tradition has not yet been unequivocally established as a universal of language.

I am getting increasingly frustrated with FrameMaker 8. It’s a nice improvement over Frame 7 in a lot of ways, but with one huge Achilles heel: it crashes when trying to create PDF’s. I have tried five ways to Sunday to save as PDF, and no matter what I do, it crashes and fails to convert. Once in a great while I can get it to convert, but then I can’t duplicate the effort, and it crashes some more.

I would think that folks from Adobe who make both Frame and Acrobat would be able to master these programs interfacing with each other, but it’s not looking that way. In this day and age when everything from Apple Pages to Google Docs to OpenOffice Writer instantly generate PDF’s at a click, it is hard to believe that a major software release from Adobe is so crippled. I really need it to start working soon.

The Chicago Manual of Style says:

As traditionally understood, grammar is both a science and an art. Often it has focused…on parts of speech and their syntax. Traditional grammar has held that there are eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections…Somewhat surprisingly, modern grammarians cannot agree on precisely how many parts of speech there are in English. At least one grammarian says there are as few as three. Another insists that there are “about fifteen,” noting that “the precise number is still being debated.”