October 23rd - Happy Hour with Neil Perlin: Preparing Help Projects for Responsive Design Preparing Legacy Help Projects for Responsive Design Do you have legacy help projects whose content is still valid and that you’d like to make responsive? The latest releases of popular help authoring tools make it easy to make legacy projects responsive with just a few mouse clicks. Unfortunately, legacy projects were often designed and created in ways that break responsive design. For example, many legacy projects use “hidden” tables to lay out images, an approach that was wrong but worked, until responsive design came along. What do you need to do to fix those problems? In this practical session, we’ll look at: • The concept of the “un-desktop” and its effect on design. • A quick review of the technical concepts of responsive design. • The need to eliminate local formatting in favor of styles and a CSS and how to do so. • The use of often unfamiliar CSS features - relative sizing for fonts and images and the use of the img float property to create fluid layout grids - and new features in CSS3 - media queries and breakpoint designation. • Effect of scaling on images, deciding when to include or exclude images, and the effect of excluding images on text that reference those images. • Effect of scaling on image maps. • Automating wording customization – from “click” to “tap” automatically. • And more. At the end of this session, you’ll know how to deal with the most common responsive design problems in legacy help projects. And many of the solutions will improve the coding of your projects even if you never make those projects responsive. About the Speaker Neil Perlin is an internationally-known online content consultant for companies from F100 to startups. He helps clients create efficient, flexible content for delivery in forms from paper to online to mobile. Neil is a columnist for STC Intercom, a popular speaker for STC, MadWorld, Lavacon, and other conferences, the creator of the Beyond the Bleeding Edge sessions at the STC summits from 1999 to 2014, and a 2010 STC Fellow. Neil is MadCap-certified in Flare and Mimic, Adobe-certified in RoboHelp, and Viziapps-certified for the Viziapps app development platform. He provides training, consulting, troubleshooting, and development for online help, mobile, apps, and related areas through Hyper/Word Services of Tewksbury, MA. You can contact him at his web site atwww.hyperword.com. Schedule 6:00PM - 6:30PM Happy Hour and Networking 6:30PM - 6:50PM Short Business Meeting 7:00PM - 8:30PM Presentation and Questions Cost $15 includes one drink and appetizers. Dinner is on your dime. Where: North Mountain Brewing Co 522 E. Dunlap Ave. Phoenix, AZ Map When: Friday, October 23rd from 6:00PM - 8:30PM RSVP on the Metro-Phoenix Technical Communicators Meetup site. |