Flare: Creating a Numbered Appendix

The outline on 3 sides of the Note style are 1/2 point, so they should be nice and thin. (Note that the left side is thick by design.) Unfortunately, Adobe makes the lines look strange, and even different at each level of zoom.

Continue reading “Ugly Lines in PDFs” →

Kill Them All! – From the Command Line

If you ever wanted to kill a process from the command line, there’s an easy way to do it.

First, show what processes are running using the tasklist command:

C:>tasklist

Second, use Taskkill to kill it by process name or process ID:

C:>Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F

C:>Taskkill /PID 26356 /F

The /F flag forces the process to quit.

[Source: Tweaks]

Plurals in English, by George Carlin

This may or may not have been written by George Carlin. Since there’s no profanity, he probably didn’t write it. But, it’s still funny.

George Carlin: The English Plurals

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes;
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese;
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

Continue reading “Plurals in English, by George Carlin” →

Know Your Organization

Technical Writers work with just about every department within a company. They get a feature description from a Product Manager, an implementation detail from R&D, and the terminology spin from Marketing. They may also deal with Support, Deployment, and whatever other deparments exist in their companies.

When dealing with all these different groups, especially when working in a large company, it helps to understand how the groups work together. This knowledge helps the TW more efficiently deal with his or her tasks, avoid hitting management walls, and know who they need to talk to. Unfortunately, it is only gained after working for the company for a long time.

Some illustrations, like the one below, of different org types were posted over at Bonker’s World.

Which one is your current company most like?

[Source: Bonker’s World]

Make your life easier – customize your MS Word toolbar

You can make your life a lot easier by customizing the MS Word toolbar with functions that you often use.

Here’s how.

Click the dropdown arrow () in the toolbar.
Select More Commands…
Click Popular Commands.
Select any command from the list and then click Add>>.

Add whatever commands you usually use. Note the following:

You can add a button to run a custom macro.
You can add a separator by selecting which is at the top of the list.

I usually add these commands:

Para Keep With Next – let’s you turn on/off the keep with next attribute.
Para Page Break Before – adds a page break before the current line of text.
Style – shows the current style and allows you to select a new style.

Reopening Old Google Chrome Tabs

I have Google Chrome (GC) configured to open whatever tabs were previously opened when the browser was closed. This setup is great since I often have 10-20 tabs open, and reopening them 1 by 1 would be a pain.

Unfortunately, what happens is that sometimes I’ll have 2 separate GC windows open, usually one of them with 20 different tabs (let’s call it A) and another with only 1 tab (called B).

A problem occurs if I close the window A first and then window B. Since GC only remembers the tabs on the last window (B) that was closed, when I restart GC it gives me the tabs from window B. Bummer.

There is another feature in GC that let’s you open a closed tab. The keyboard shortcut is Cntl-shift-Tab. When you accidentally close a tab, just type the keyboard shortcut and it reopens the closed tab.

And now for the cool part….

When you open GC, if you type Cntl-shift-Tab, it reopens a closed tab from even before you closed the browser. I my case above, when GC is restarted, window B opens. If I type Cntl-shift-Tab, it opens browser window A that was closed!