MADCAP SOFTWARE LAUNCHES MADCAP ANALYZER, FIRST SOFTWARE TO PROACTIVELY SUGGEST CONTENT DEVELOPMENT IMPROVEMENTS
MadCap Analyzer Also Provides Over Twice the Reporting Functionality of Any Competitor, Including Industry’s Only Customizable ReportsLa Jolla, CA, USA – January 14, 2008
— MadCap Software, the leader in multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft XPS, today announced the debut of MadCap Analyzer, the first software to proactively suggest document development improvements. MadCap Analyzer also provides the most comprehensive project reporting in the technical documentation industry, delivering more than twice the functionality of any competing solution.MadCap Analyzer works with MadCap Flare, the company’s flagship native-XML authoring product, and MadCap Blaze, the native-XML alternative to Adobe FrameMaker for publishing long print documents, which will be generally available in early 2008. With Analyzer, documentation professionals can get an entire picture of their Flare or Blaze projects—and fix most issues right in Analyzer. There’s no need to flip between products or to print the list of problems and then search through a Flare or Blaze project. Analyzer’s reporting of more than 50 issues is complemented by the industry’s only customizable report functionality.
MadCap Analyzer is being announced today in conjunction with MadCap Lingo, an XML-based, fully integrated translation memory system and authoring tool, which eliminates the need for file transfers (see press release also dated January 14, 2008). Together, the products represent a significant milestone in MadCap’s development of the industry’s most complete product suite, delivering solutions for authoring, collaboration, analysis, and translation. Based on native XML and offering full Unicode support, MadCap’s software uniquely addresses the documentation requirements of today’s global, Internet-enabled economy.
“For too long, authors have had to manually review and correct their documentation. With so much detail to evaluate, at best it can take hundreds of hours to identify issues and make the necessary changes. Worst case, authors are literally overwhelmed, and they publish documents with errors and inconsistencies, or they miss important improvements,” said Anthony Olivier, MadCap CEO. “MadCap Analyzer applies nearly two decades of best practices in documentation design to powerful reporting and analysis capabilities. For the first time, authors can immediately see what is and isn’t working in their content and design, and they can implement improvements based on proven techniques. Manual content review and revisions that previously took hours can now be accomplished in minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.”
Using MadCap Analyzer is easy. An author simply uses Analyzer to open a Flare or Blaze project. The author then immediately sees a list of issues and suggestions for the project. The author can fix the identified problems and make suggested changes. Information captured in Analyzer includes:
- Statistics on modification dates plus tallies of words, segments, images, snippets
(reusable content pieces), broken links, undefined variables, undefined styles, and topics.
- Links, such as broken hypertext, bookmarks, image links, external links, absolute links,
outgoing links, and incoming links.
- Topic issues, including topics that are not included in the index or the selected table of
contents (TOC), duplicate TOC items, non-XML topics, topics with images, and duplicate
context-sensitive help (CSH) map IDs.
- Unused or undefined elements, such as undefined glossary terms, variables, condition
tags, or styles; topics that aren’t linked; or unused items such as content files, images,
variables, condition tags, styles, or CSH IDs.
- Used components in a project, including conditional tags, language tags, variables, index
keywords, index keyword links, concepts, concept links, images, and style sheets.
- Reports, which can be completely customized by selecting the types of issues to include
(any of the issues already mentioned, plus many more), as well as the look of the report; authors
can save reports and open reports in a browser window to print them.
Analyzer suggestions can help improve content in several ways. One of the most important is suggesting where authors may want to replace content with snippets (reusable formatted content) or variables (reusable non-formatted content). For example, Analyzer reports on matching text (phrases or segments) that an author has written in many places, and if no snippet or variable exists, encourages the author to create a snippet for that matching content, greatly improving the project and simplifying future changes.
Similarly Analyzer can help authors to make better use of existing snippets. Sharon Burton, the MadCap product manager responsible for Analyzer explains, “Let’s say that you have written a tip into a snippet because it is repeated in dozens of places throughout your project. Later, perhaps you write the same tip in new topic, forgetting that you have already created a snippet for it. This is where Analyzer comes in. Analyzer realizes that you created content that matches an existing snippet, so it suggests that you replace the new text with that snippet. This feature—unique to Analyzer—allows you to take full advantage of Flare’s single-sourcing capabilities, reduce localization costs, and maintain your project consistency.”
Analyzer also uses suggestions to find locally formatted text (for example, text that authors have made red and underlined by using buttons in the text format toolbar) that matches existing styles in a project. In this case, Analyzer suggests using the style instead of the local formatting. If the author does not yet have a style that matches the locally formatted content, Analyzer recommends creating one and then helps the author build it.
Significantly, Analyzer allows authors to add or edit content (for example, topics, snippets, variables, styles, index keywords, concepts, glossary terms)—and complete spell checking—all from the Analyzer interface. Even though the author makes the changes in the Analyzer interface, the modifications actually occur in the Flare or Blaze project that is being analyzed. If authors prefer to work in the Flare or Blaze project, they can also select a particular content file in the Analyzer interface and tell it to open the file in the Flare or Blaze project. In either case, the author can choose which is more convenient.