Do More with Authoring

Typefi Writer has always been a desktop solution—but we believe that the future of authoring will be online. That’s why Guy and the team have developed new Typefi Writer integrations with Google Docs and Word365, and Typefi Server integrations with XML authoring tools including oXygen and Fonto. Check out the presentation to see demos of each integration.

Transcript | Presenter

Transcript

---

00:00	Intro
00:54	The teams behind the scenes
03:29	Typefi Writer
05:10	Floating styles panels
06:42	New apply styles options
09:31	Missing links detection
13:04	Customer feedback
14:17	Edifix integration
14:45	Replace local formatting feature
21:07	Word 365 & Google Docs integrations
29:08	oXygen & Fonto integrations
36:31	Q&A

---

Intro (00:00)

GUY: Good morning. My name is Guy van der Kolk. I’m from Holland. I know a lot of you by face, but there’s also some people in the room that we’ve never met before, so at least not me. So welcome this morning.

I’m product manager at Typefi, at least at this point. I just got my celebration plaque for being with the company for nine years. I originally started out as a solutions consultant like a lot of my colleagues and was able to transition into product management because if there’s anything I love, it’s how can we make things better and easier for you? And now I have that control myself, almost.

But I don’t do that myself. I may be the one speaking here today, but I’m not the only one doing the work. Actually most of the work, especially when it comes to programming, is done by others.

The teams behind the scenes (00:54)

So I just wanted to quickly highlight the teams that I’ve worked with that have enabled the things that I will be showing you today.

So we’ve got our Writer team, led by Apsara, and most of these teams are in Sri Lanka, and they’ve worked really, the Writer team has worked really hard on Writer 8.7.4, which is our current latest version that I will be showing you off some things with later.

But also our Docx team, the Docx to content XML, which is Typefi’s flavour of xml, do a lot of hard work on the background that most of you don’t even see because it’s magic. You push the button in Writer and something comes out on the other end. But the Docx team is working hard to make that happen.

The server team, there’s more than seven people in, or there’s more than one person in the server team. But Amilla is the one that has been working very closely with me on some of the things that I will be showing you later.

And we would be nowhere without our QA team who is led by Andrew. And Andrew has a thing about pictures, but he cycles to work every day, 20 kilometres. So that’s representative of Andrew.

So without these people, none of what I will be showing you today and what we will be continuing to work on in the future would be possible. So just wanted to give them a big thank you for, on your behalf.

So what will we be talking about today? Well, we’re gonna start with something that already exists.

We’re gonna be talking about Writer 64 bit, which I know I see at least maybe half of the people that are in the room use Typefi Writer. So I wanna make sure and spend a little bit of time on that.

But like I said, that already exists. The things that don’t exist yet and that are a sneak peek into what the future might bring is Google Docs and Word 365.

I liked what Caleb just said, like that’s our pandemic project. We’re looking at, okay, what else is possible? So we’ll be taking a look at that.

And the final thing I’ll be showing off today is our XML editing and authoring integration within Typefi. So the first one exists, the other two is in progress.

And this morning, because I will be showing you everything live, this morning I did my little *laughs*, on the altar to the demonstration gods. I did my little *laughs*. So I’m going to make, hope that everything works out as it is. That were my slides. So not too many slides this morning.

Typefi Writer (03:29)

So Typefi Writer. Typefi Writer, the team and I have worked really hard. I’ve taken over the Typefi Writer project. It was my first project that I started as product manager about two years ago.

And we immediately started with one of the biggest tasks that we’ve ever undertaken, and that is making Typefi Writer, which is one of our core software products, available for 64 bit versions of Windows. Because for the longest time 32 bit was the default for everything, but at some point Microsoft said 64 bit is now going to be the future, better memory management, blah blah blah.

So we had to make sure that Typefi Writer was ready for when you and your organisation switched to 64 bit. So we had to rewrite it from scratch because the technologies in 64 bit are completely different. But we needed to make sure that it still worked the same way for you because you don’t want differences in the product.

So that was a very big project. It took us about a year and a half from the first line of code to having tested the functionality of every single button again. And we got that out early I think summer last year and now we’re on the fourth release of the 64 bit version of Microsoft, of Typefi Writer.

Floating styles panels (05:10)

Now when we started with that first build of the 64 bit edition, our main goal was it needs to work exactly the same as the 32 bit. But we also wanted to see if we could add some very small things. And one of the things that had always frustrated me as a user of Typefi Writer was the fact that when you’re using the paragraph style buttons, the paragraph and the character style buttons within the Typefi Writer ribbon, in the 32 bit version of Word, those could not float.

So if you were applying your paragraph styles, you always needed to click apply close click apply close, which nobody did, which means that people were using the Word styles panel. But the small issue with the Word styles panel is it shows all of the paragraph styles that are available in Word, not just the ones that have been carefully defined by your template users.

So when we switched to 64 bit, our teams found that we actually could now make floating panels. So we expanded our directive of, it should work exactly the same as the 32 bit to, but let’s make this new feature because it will make a big difference for the ways that our customers use it.

So now in Typefi Writer 8.7.0, this was the first build and obviously it’s available in the current latest version as well, you have floating paragraph and character styles panels that only show you the styles that have been defined in your template.

New apply styles options (06:42)

But we wanted to do a little bit more than just have this. So we added two new options that you can see. Yes you can see it because it’s mirrored. We added an option that allows you to apply your selected style to multiple paragraphs.

So how does that work? If you have an existing document, not one that you have to apply structure from scratch, but you have a document that has some decent paragraph styles and things applied, but you just like in this case the Typefi elements overview, this paragraph right here, that should be a heading. And there’s a couple of other ones that where the heading hasn’t been properly applied.

So in this situation what you can do is you can put your cursor in a paragraph style, you can choose the heading or the paragraph style that you want to apply, and then you can choose the apply selected style to multiple paragraphs button and then every paragraph you click will now have that style applied.

So that’s an excellent feature that works in, when there is already a little bit of structure in your document, when you don’t need to start entirely from scratch.

But what if, I think we all have them, the authors that just categorically refuse to do anything other than apply normal and then bold and colour and—nobody in this room has those? Okay, no that’s good because I’d be out of a job if that was the case.

So in those situations, let me switch to my other document. Where was it? Yes. So here we have an example. Let me actually put it in draft mode just so that you can see that I’m not lying. This is really truly normal from beginning to end, every single one of them. So we added this other option where if you have the paragraph styles panel, the second button says apply selected style and move to the next paragraph.

And as that name implies, what you can do is, it will start with the first paragraph, so that one has the, I think it was a title, and you can see that my cursor automatically moves to the next paragraph so I can then go in and apply my heading one. Well this is a heading two. And so you can very quickly go through your document and apply your styling to it if it starts completely from scratch.

So those are two of the features that we introduced in the course of the development of Typefi Writer. So if you’re using the latest version of Typefi Writer in 64 bit 8.7.4, you’ll be able to use these features as well.

Missing links detection (09:31)

But that’s not the only thing the team and I have been working on.

One of the other things that we found and that we actually looked at InDesign, people that use InDesign, they have a very good way of telling you when your links are missing.

When you’ve got your figures in your documents or other things, when you work in InDesign there’s a little panel that says, hey, this stuff is missing, are you sure you want to proceed with anything that you do?

So, when something like that works, we were like, but in our workflow with Typefi Writer, there’s a similar potential issue where you are publishing your document and if there is a link that’s missing or someone that moved accidentally, moved somewhere, something over, then you’re not gonna know about that. So we built in a feature that detects missing links.

So if you look at your Explore Document, then you’re going to find that when you’re using the latest version of Typefi Writer, there will now be a warning if links are missing. If for example, somebody renamed a folder since the last time that you were working on it. I do apologise, it’s taking a little moment to start—demo gods!

There we go. So we can see here that there is a warning here related to the links and we can see that not all of our links are missing, but some of them are right? So now that we know that, we can actually fix it before we send the job.

Before you would publish the job and you would be reviewing your PDF and that’s where you would find, ah, there’s three missing graphics. So we now moved that forward in your publishing process. So you can go ahead and go in here and you can relink to that folder.

I don’t remember exactly where it was. What was I looking for? This front cover? So I think that was in, actually the assets folder. Yes, there it is. Click on open, and now because it will detect that there’s other missing links in that same area. When I close this, it will tell me, do I want to replace these missing links in all the things?

The people that use InDesign are like, yeah, we know where you got that from. Yeah, yes, it’s entirely true.

But one of the funny things that as a product manager, we developed this and I was like, I’m so excited for this. I think we introduced this in Typefi Writer 8.7.1. I’m like, I’m excited, this is a cool feature, it will be very helpful. And customers came back and said, yeah, thank you for developing this, but there’s one issue—sometimes we actually don’t have the links yet, so we just want not to be warned about missing links.

I was like, huh, I did not think about that. That’s something that we obviously need to fix. So in the next release of Typefi Writer, we did that. We made it optional so that when you’re looking at the workflow options, you now have the choice. You can either choose to check for missing links, which will warn you when you try to publish your job or you can say, don’t worry about it, I will manually check my links whenever I’m ready for it.

Customer feedback (13:04)

So that’s an example and that’s something that I want, a little seed that I want to plant for you as we’re heading into our round tables. But also anytime you’re doing anything. We live by the feedback that you gave, that you give us.

I had a conversation with Maynard actually who was in this room and just a couple of, I think maybe six weeks ago or something where he was like, I was showing him and he’s like, oh that’s some cool new features, but you know what would be really useful, when I’m tagging my tables that I can automatically, Typefi will show me the next table rather than that I need to scroll through and find.

I was like, hmm, why didn’t I think of that? Well thank you Maynard. That’s something that the team and I are now investigating and working on.

So as we’re moving into the round tables and as I’m showing you this when it comes to Typefi Writer or anything that you’re doing with your content on the authoring side, because that’s my responsibility as product manager, please tell me because I want to make your life as easy as I possibly can be, short of cloning your authors and zapping them how to use styles, which is the only thing unfortunately I can’t do. I would if I could but I can’t.

Edifix integration (14:17)

All right, other things that we’ve worked on are integrations.

So we have an integration with Edifix, which allows you to verify your references. Edifix is a part of Inera, which is one of our longstanding partners.

Not gonna show that now live, but there’s a video online that shows exactly that. So if you’re doing a lot of references and you would like some help in your Typefi Writer workflow, that’s a tool that we have.

Replace local formatting feature (14:45)

But the last thing that I absolutely want to end with, which we released in Typefi Writer 8.7.4 is the ability to look for local formatting.

One of the other things in, we as structured people so to speak, we like using character styles, defining exactly what we want. The people that are working in InDesign know exactly what I mean.

Sometimes you’ll have a font that has a very specific weight, so it doesn’t necessarily have a bold, but it may have something like a heavy or something like that. And in InDesign you can specifically say, okay, when there’s something is called, when you apply bold, when you do your control B, apply heavy instead. But in Word that doesn’t exist.

And again, authors and rightfully so, I mean we can joke about they’re not willing to apply character styles or paragraph styles, but people just want to do control B or click the bold button. We’re never going to get rid of that and I don’t think we should, but there is the need for, okay fine, the authors do that. But when we go to InDesign, we want to have our proper character styles applied so that we can make sure it looks the way it’s supposed to look.

That was not possible in Typefi Writer before, unless you used the Word find and replace features, which, well, they’re okay, but they weren’t doing what I wanted them to do. So in Typefi Writer 64 bit 8.7.4, we introduced a new category in the Explore Document. And that category, as you can see here is called local formatting.

So in that we find all instances, and as you can see it’s sorted by paragraph style. So, here for example, we see that there’s one instance of bold applied to a heading one, within a heading one. So as I click on those, as I click on those instances, you will see in the background that my document actually moves to highlight that particular instance.

And what I can see here is that the author clearly meant to only, because that’s the other thing, authors apply bold to entire headings, even if we don’t want them to, that’s just what they do. But here clearly it was only applied to a subset. So it’s clearly meant to actually indicate that it is meant to be bold.

But in this other instance we can see here there is three instances where bold has been applied to the entire paragraph, which I don’t want. You can see it right there at the bottom. I don’t want that. So what can we do?

Well for one, this new local formatting allows you to find all of these instances of bold and italic and underline and all those other things. That’s a small part. The other thing is it will allow you to replace them.

So if we go back to that heading one, excuse me, if we go back to this one, we want this to be replaced with a character style. So I’m going to click the replace button and I’m going to, and it’s only going to do it selectively because right now I want to selectively, I don’t want to replace everything because a bold in a heading might be very different than the bold in my regular text versus a bold in a table for example. You know, might be using different fonts or different weights for those things.

So here I just want to replace the bold and I’m going to choose from down here, I am going to choose bold headings and replace all. In this case there’s only one instance of it. So it’s going to do that and then that local formatting instance disappears and I’ve actually, it is correctly applied, but I see that I forgot to make the character style actually appear as bold in Word. I’ll fix that for the next demonstration.

Anyway. And the other thing that we wanted to do was in that heading three, we actually didn’t want to use bold, we just want to keep it the way it was defined. So you can see that there is an option to replace with nothing, remove all of the instances. So I could go ahead and choose replace all again and then it will remove those instances of local formatting.

And obviously you then go through and you do that. And then the last thing you’re left with is your body text or you do a quick replace and then you’re ready to go and publish.

And here too, learning from the missing links, we realised that some people might want to be warned about this, some people might actually want to know that this is happening. So we’ve added an option that you can set where, again in your workflow options, you may have seen it before when I was showing you the other one, there is an option that if you wish, you can enable check for local formatting when you click Typefi publish.

So that you can make sure that nothing ever gets sent to the Typefi server that doesn’t have all of the local formatting either removed or replaced with character styles.

That’s Typefi Writer 8.7.4 64 bit edition. And as it comes to the future, like I said, we have some plans that we’re working on including the one about applying tables and maybe identifying graphics and allowing you to replace that quicker.

But I’m really, in our round table or at any time when you’re doing your work and you’re like, God, I wish Typefi could make this editorial work a little bit easier, think of me, let me know and I’ll gladly have a chat with you or your team to see how we can continue to improve Typefi Writer to help you do more.

Any questions you may have about any of the features, I’m just going to, we’ll have a chance at the round table to talk about them.

Word 365 & Google Docs integrations (21:07)

All right, so this was talking about what exists today. You can go, if you’re using Typefi Writer, you can go onto the server right now and download Typefi Writer 8.7.4 and use all of these features. But what about what’s coming?

As part of our pandemic project, we started to look at, my son is going to university right now. He started his first year and the way that they’re using technology and word processing is different from the way that I’m used to it.

If we’re talking about what, mirroring what Caleb said earlier, this idea of document, of things that you work with that have a specific location somewhere on your computer or on your shared drive is something that I’m, that we’re all used to, but my son uses Google Docs. They don’t, like, he doesn’t even have an application installed on his computer except for the browser and the stuff that comes with it and that’s the way they work, that’s the way they roll.

For us, that’s different. But it did make us think, okay, let’s do an investigation and let’s see what’s possible because I have no doubt that the future is in the browser. There will be a time, whether it’s 5 years from now, 10 years from now, I don’t know, that’s gonna depend I think on the adoption of how we all work with it. But I have no doubt that the future is in the browser.

And if you look at, I’m now sharing Microsoft Word 365. Now Microsoft has in my humble opinion a branding problem because they’re calling it 365 and it’s like this big encompassing thing, but nobody really understands the difference. To everybody, it’s like, you know. But Word 365 when we’re talking about it or the internal name is Writer 365, we’re specifically talking about browser based work.

If you look at Microsoft Word in the browser now compared to the first time I opened it up two and a half, maybe three years ago, two and a half, three years ago, I dismissed it. What am I gonna do? Type a couple of quick notes? Now you look at it, you look at Word 365 but also Google Docs. They are full-fledged collaborative environments that are quite rich in features.

So we started by doing a comparison like okay, let’s say that we want to build something. For example, one of the questions we get asked from some of our Mac based customers, is there ever going to be a Writer for Mac? Well, because Word for Mac for all intents and purposes was written by somebody in an entirely different galaxy. The two technologies are not compatible and never will be. But what is more likely is that browser based stuff is going to work quite well for the future.

So we took a look and we investigated what is possible with Google Docs at this time. And I remember the first time I worked with Google Docs, merging of cells was not possible. Can you imagine? You could not merge a cell in Google Docs in a table three years ago!

I’m glad to tell you that is now solved because, it has been for quite a while, because there’s a table somewhere in here in my document that has all of the mergings that we possibly could. So those kinds of things, that goes to show that every time there’s more and more improvement.

One of the last updates that they did, which is not necessarily a content feature but is very useful is the outline. The fact that you can see all of the heading styles that have been applied to your document, that is something that I find very useful in my day to day work.

That’s a brilliant addition, but they don’t have end notes. So Google Doc still doesn’t have end notes. Is that a big deal? I don’t know. If your content requires end notes, it might be, but it’s a very robust environment.

So what the team and I have been working on and what the demo gods did deny me is an integration with Google Docs.

So we, it’s not publicly available right now, it’s just something that’s running on my system locally. And obviously depending on your feedback, like if you’re saying, hey look, this Google Docs thing, we’re actually using that. I think more likely this Word 365 thing, we’re seeing ourselves use that more and we’ve added the ability to attach a server connection, the same way that you do in Typefi Writer. You connect to the server, you can attach a workflow and you can take this document and send it to Typefi and download the PDF. And once this integrates with Project Marcoola, that will actually be much cooler.

So that’s Google Docs and looking at Writer for Word 365, Writer you can already see, in Google Docs there was absolutely no way we could add the structural components. You’ve got in Google Docs, you’ve got your heading styles one through six, your title, your subtitle, you’ve got very good numbered and bulleted list support, multi-level, all that good stuff is brilliant. But there was no way for us to add the Typefi additional structure.

You can see that in Word 365, we’re actually experimenting with that. So you can see that we’ve for example, inserted a section, which is, the paragraph styles are the most basic form of structure, but we’re adding sections as well.

Is it ready for full on production? Not really. One of the challenges that the team and I ran into in terms of technology is that if we look at Typefi Writer, you know you can insert a section, it’s one block, but here you can see there is a section default where it starts. But there also has to be a section at the end, which is a difference from the way that Typefi Writer works. But we’re able to insert sections. So that does make us hopeful that we could potentially elaborate on this in the future.

And the way that we see this right now is that you would be able to start, you won’t be able to use Writer 365 in the browser fully to do a complete document, but you would be able to start in the browser, you know you could start the collaborative process in the browser, insert your basic high level structure, do a first proof, tag your tables, that kind of thing.

And then as you are required to do more, maybe you want to insert cross references and those kinds of things, then you can open the document in Typefi Writer seamlessly, these tags are converted automatically and then you would potentially be able to continue with that additional work.

So I myself looking at this, I think looking at a lot of you and I’m very much looking for feedback from the way that you use the browser in your day to day work. And if you are seeing these trends of more and more work in the browser, because that will obviously dictate whether this is something that we’re going to continue exploring and seeing what we can do.

So that’s something I’ll be asking you now to think about for the round table. Tell me how you are seeing this collaborative authoring and if there’s any other tools that you’re seeing yourself use where we could potentially integrate.

oXygen & Fonto integrations (29:08)

All right. So that was the second thing about the future. The last one, because we’ve been talking a lot about Word based, which is good because I like using Word, but we must not forget if we look at the people in this room here today, there is this other thing, XML, sort of important for a lot of you, that may start its life in Word at some point but definitely doesn’t end up in Word, or some of them we convert it back.

So we decided to take a look at what would be possible in terms of integrations. And this is another partner story.

So we’ve got the browser and Vlad, if you’re ready to log into the admin server then it’s not yet, but I’ll point to you.

So a lot of you, especially if you’re like, I have oXygen on pretty much every computer that I have because that’s where we live and breathe. But for not everybody has oXygen on their computer and still there is this requirement for sometimes you want to make a tweak or an edit at the last moment.

So we are going to be integrating two partners into Typefi server. Right now I’m still showing you just the regular way it will work in the current version of Typefi server. We’re obviously also looking at how this would integrate with Project Marcoola, but that’s still in the early stages.

So I’m going to be showing you a DITA example because both of these authors, both of these environments offer native DITA support. But obviously Oxygen Web Author, which is one of our partners SyncRO Soft, is, well you all know it. If you’ve got the regular oXygen installed, the oXygen web authoring environment is, I don’t wanna say almost as powerful, but again in that spirit of what is possible in the browser is.

Anyway, so in a future version of Typefi server, which we’re currently planning for first quarter of next year, so that you have a little bit of an idea, there is now a new button.

So you’ve seen that I’ve selected this DITA map. DITA map is the, sort of like a library of other XML files below it and we have this new edit button. So when I click that, and because of the internet here, I’ve actually done it before so it’s already open because it does, over the internet, obviously it takes a little bit of time.

So we’ve got this DITA map open in oXygen web authoring and this is not a demonstration of everything you can do with oXygen because it’s an integration. If you are used to oXygen and oXygen web author, you already know what’s possible in that environment. But I just wanted to show you that we can open this, we’ve got access to the validation on the right hand side. There’s basic review steps. And the thing that I find interesting is the fact that you can open your document in XML only mode if that is something that you want to do.

So that integration is coming, but obviously we also want you to be able to attach your workflows and publish this document directly from this environment so you don’t need to step back and do something else. So you can go ahead and attach your workflows and then the next step would be that you could publish this and get some output, which I’ll do shortly.

Let me, alright, so I’m going to close this Vlad and then let me undo the checkout. So if you could do the switch, it’s done. Cool. All right.

So oXygen web authoring is one of the environments that we will be working with in terms of integration. And like I said, that one will be very pleasing to our customers who are already used to the environment of oXygen and who like brackets.

But there’s also a group of people for which XML is not necessarily, they’re not too much into the curly brackets, they prefer the more traditional, looking more like a little bit more like Word, a thing like that. So the other integration that we are working with is with our partner Fonto.

And Fonto has, and if all goes well, my colleague put the switch in the back, if all goes well, and it didn’t go well *laughs* as tends to happen. Let me do a quick refresh. Did you do it on the Typefi customer of Vlad? Because I think that, okay, let me double check. I mean the demo gods have been quite kind to me this morning, so I’m not complaining at all. Let me see if it works. Fingers crossed.

Yes. Weee! Thank you Vlad *laughs*. All right. So the process is the same. Our customers will be able to choose one or the other integration and details about that will be coming shortly.

But looking at this, Fonto is a little bit less about the curly brackets. Obviously they’re there in the background because as with oXygen, you know, can go ahead and look at the XML based structure. But Fonto is much more, it looks a lot much more like a traditional Word based authoring environment.

So you know, you can see that this looks pretty much like a regular Word document while in the background it’s still DITA that’s being opened up. And the same thing, you’ll be able to attach a workflow.

Excuse me. So I’m going, the last thing that I’m going to be doing and then, no, I’m actually not going to tempt the demo gods anymore.

So, that’s a summary of all the things that the authoring team and I have been working on in the last couple of months. So there’s going to, Chandi remind me, was there a round table around this as well? I don’t, there was. Okay, cool.

So as this morning progresses and as we prepare for the round tables, whether it’s this topic or the topic of Writer or online authoring, we’re looking for your daily use stories. What are the challenges you find and how would you like us to help you? Whether it’s with XML editing and authoring in the browser or any of the other challenges that you face with your authoring.

Right. Thank you so much. I think, yeah, a little bit early.

Q&A (36:31)

Are there any questions in general that you want to ask now because we have a couple of minutes? Yes.

AUDIENCE: You had mentioned that you can turn off the ability to check for links, but then afterwards you said once you turn it on, you to go back and manually check them later. Is there a way to toggle it back on and let it run the automatic check if you didn’t do it from the beginning?

GUY: There is not, but now that you asked that question, I am thinking there should be *laughs*. I think there should be an option in, when you’re publishing to check from missing links. You can always do it manually, but I think you’re right, manually people will still likely forget it.

So yeah, I’ll have our team work on having an option when you publish just in case you forget.

Cool. Anybody else? If not, all right. I’m going to thank you for your attention. Thank you for being here this morning.

It has been a pleasure being able to talk to so many of you and not be behind the screen and I look forward to the conversations that we’re going to be having the rest of the day. Thank you.