Return to Home Page REVIEW: HTML TRANSIT
How to answer the question "what's for dinner?"
when you're too busy to cook.

B Y   M A T T   A B E
Twin Cities Chapter

HTML Transit comes to the rescue for porting long hardcopy docs to HTML when the boss is restless, "Save As HTML" just doesn't quite cut it, and there's no time for hand-coding.

Hamburger helper

Every now and then when it's my turn to cook, the clock creeps close to dinner time, and my two young kids, although not yet in the habit of verbally asking what's for dinner, begin picking on each other or asking for snacks. In these situations, I need to get a reasonably nutritious dinner on the table fast, before my wife gets home hungry from a busy afternoon, only to be greeted by an empty table and a kiddie meltdown.

On other days, we have friends over and spend half the afternoon preparing a gourmet meal with carefully selected fresh ingredients, fine wine, and coffee from fresh-ground whole Kona coffee beans.

Likewise, some days you are cruising along following your carefully prepared project schedule (you know, the one that will work fine as long as nothing goes wrong), when someone asks:

  • "Oh, by the way, we need to ship this product manual in HTML too" or,
  • "We need an intranet. Can you create one?" or,
  • "Can you post this fifty-page policy and procedures manual to our intranet in HTML (our employees still haven't figured out how to install Acrobat Reader)?"
Just as online authors followed the evolution of Windows Help-authoring tools as their usability and usefulness improved, I have been evaluating various HTML conversion utilities. I needed something that would take my Adobe FrameMaker manuals and convert them to HTML, with little if any manual slicing, dicing, and parboiling. I waited breathlessly for Adobe to ship the final version of its beta "HoTaMaLe" conversion plug-in, and was disappointed by a tool that inherited FrameMaker's code-filled reference page method. (Thanks, but it took me long enough to figure out the FrameMaker table of contents, and my kids need to eat NOW.)

Plug-and-play HTML HTML Transit version 3.2, from InfoAccess Inc., leverages the structure-based nature of HTML with the format styles you use in applications such as FrameMaker and Microsoft Word. HTML Transit really cooks when you feed it consistently structured documents, such as technical manuals, policies, and procedures. It maps, for example, your Main Heading in FrameMaker, to the HTML equivalent, H1 (or any other tag you specify). But this is just the appetizer.

HTML Transit's main course consists of its ability to automatically wrap your original document in a visual package that's right at home in your favorite browser, complete with previous and next buttons, hyperlinks, tables of contents (with or without frames), and more. This is all accomplished as follows:

  1. Define a set of source documents (a "publication"), which may include documents from a mixture of supported formats including FrameMaker (MIF), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AmiPro, and WordPerfect.
  2. Identify the formatting styles in the source documents.
  3. Specify how you want each source style to appear in the final HTML (screen shot).
  4. Specify global parameters such as background patterns and navigation elements (screen shot).
  5. Translate the publication into the final HTML document (HTML Transit automatically converts your imported graphics into GIF or JPG format).
HTML Transit also lets you define formatting for source documents that lack formatting styles (for instance, plain text ASCII documents). HTML Transit has a familiar, Microsoft Office-like interface. You can have HTML Transit walk you through the process with a wizard, or you can go right to the tabbed dialogs and tweak to your heart's content. No HTML coding is required, or even recommended. You specify everything in the GUI, and all your settings are applied when you convert a document (or set of documents), so any hand-coding of the resulting HTML is lost the next time you run the conversion (or "translation," as the product calls it). The source document remains unchanged by the conversion, another plus.

After you translate a publication to HTML, you can view it in the web browser of your choice with just the click of a button in the HTML Transit toolbar. I configured it so I can easily check my results in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. This makes it easy to repeatedly translate, view, make changes, and translate again. This is especially useful when you are first learning how to use the product or defining HTML Transit formatting options for a new document.

HTML Transit includes an extensive library of graphic elements such as bullets, separators, forward and back buttons, and tiled backgrounds. You can use them in the predefined sets or mix-and-match your own. These tasty ingredients are all beautifully designed and color coordinated, and range in style from conservative to funky. You would spend a lot of time searching the web or other clip art collections for matched elements of similar quality, and time is in short supply, remember?

By the way, HTML Transit translates FrameMaker and Word tables into HTML tables without fuss. Competitive products I evaluated could not do this as well, if at all.

Sample projects Here are a few examples of the projects I have created using HTML Transit:
  • Single-source manual - When my company added a web-based interface to one of its printer products, it seemed logical to provide the hardcopy user manual online using the same interface. Once the Transit formats ("elements") were defined, I made changes to the hardcopy manual (created in FrameMaker), then used HTML Transit to translate it into a multi-page HTML document, complete with automatically generated table of contents.

  • Online policy manual - I excerpted a good portion of my company's safety policy on our intranet site by OCR scanning selected pages into RTF, then translating these pages into HTML with HTML Transit.

  • Intranet site - I used FrameMaker to create a series of structured pages, and configured the Transit template to produce HTML that looks more like a web site than an online manual. The site includes source documents created by Word and Microsoft Project, and links to other parts of the intranet and Internet.
Limitations HTML Transit has trouble with some complicated FrameMaker layouts, such as a graphic plus text frame within an anchored frame. This type of layout is how a figure and caption are often grouped in FrameMaker. Since it is a template-based interface, you may not be able to employ your favorite esoteric HTML tricks, but remember, the task at hand is to get a decent meal on the table, quickly!

(OK, if you need to link to files outside the HTML Transit publication, or just have to add some feature not provided in the product's templates, you can add your own raw HTML code, which the translation process will simply pass through untouched.)

Documentation and tech support The documentation is spare, so if you like big reference manuals, you will be disappointed. Instead, the product's tech writing team provides a series of quick tutorials that, upon completion, leave you feeling ready to remove the training wheels and head out for the open road.

Tech support is provided through all the usual channels. The few questions I have had were answered in detail on the InfoAccess web site.

This product scales up to a server-based version called Transit Central, for those really big web publishing projects needing automation.

Bon appetit! HTML Transit is an easy-to-use and versatile application that enables you to automatically and quickly translate source documents from a variety of formats into HTML, with professional results. It's just the tool for technical communicators when time is short or you would just rather be productive instead of bogged down in HTML.

For further information

Product Package

HTML Transit 3.2
InfoAccess Inc.
http://www.infoaccess.com/
Sales: (800) 344-9737
Retail price: $495, multiple-copy licenses available
Trial version downloadable from the web

Return to Home Page Matt Abe (matta@leonardo.lmt.com) is the Documentation Group Leader at ColorSpan Corporation. Matt has been cooking for over seventeen years in the technical communication kitchen. He is a past president of the Twin Cities Chapter, and enjoys speaking to high school and university classes about technical communication careers.
Winter 1999
Volume 2, # 1