I love SnagIt and have used it exclusively for screenshots since 2003. I've got all sorts of profiles defined that make my life much easier (all assigned to keystrokes, of course). The included editor lets me crop areas, add text, resize graphics (when I didn't resize them on capture), and more.

So I'm thrilled to see the new features that TechSmith has included with version 8. They've changed the design of the Profiles screen, making it even easier to grab screenshots and to see the details for each profile. They've also enhanced the editor (which I use a lot).

And they've added some new features that will help me when supporting clients. SnagIt now lets you capture a Web page as a graphic, but the links aren't static; they are embedded, as long as you save the graphic in a format that supports embedded links, such as PDF (a new SnagIt output format) or Flash. There's also a feature that lets you create interactive graphics (like imagemaps).

If you're looking for a screen capture tool, check out SnagIt. And if you already use it, plan on upgrading...you'll be glad you did.

You hear a lot these days about the "sandwich generation"...folks "in their 50s or 60s, sandwiched between aging parents, adult children and grandchildren. OR Those in their 30s and 40s, with young children, aging parents and grandparents." (term coined by Carol Abaya)

Technically, I should be a member of the Sandwich Generation, although they really don't have a definition that fits me. I'll soon be in my 50s, I have a young child, and I guess my mother is considered "aging" at 74 (although she'd probably be offended by it ;-) ).

What I really am is a generation straddler. I don't really fit in with any generation...on the other hand, I fit in with several. I have a lot in common with Jesse's friends' parents...school, soccer, kid's movies, etc. But I also have a lot in common with their grandparents...we lived through the same events.

Meanwhile, I went to a Pampered Chef party last night at a friend's house. One of the women commented that her mother needs to be more careful. It seems that her mom broke a finger while sledding with her granddaughter. Her mom is 51.

At the same party, someone asked me how Jesse was doing with swimming. We're proud of him...he's qualified for 10 events at Regionals in three weeks. And his team has been invited by Harvard University to watch the Harvard-Yale-Princeton (HYP) meet next weekend. Another woman, whose son swims for Yale, asked which college he swims for. (Uh...none. He's in third grade ;-).)

So I enjoyed reading Adair Lara's article on MSN today. She's three years older than I am, and she's been trying to figure out what she wanted her grandaughters to call her, because she's too young to be called "grandma". And she doesn't look anything like Fisher-Price's picture of a grandma...although I might by the time Jesse has kids ;-)

One of the many discussions on HATT this week revolved around Web standards. It's long been known that RoboHelp HTML (from eHelp > Macromedia > Adobe) is non-standard and non-compliant. Someone asked if this really caused a problem on end-user systems.

The answer is, of course, "it depends": It depends on the browser you're using. It depends on how you access the output (dial-up or high-speed; browser or mobile device or Internet-enabled refrigerator). It depends on the phase of the moon ;-)

My answer onlist was that non-standard output can be an inconvenience, one that you don't necessarily know about ahead of time. You could visit a page from one system today and it works fine. You could visit it from another system tomorrow and it doesn't. Or a browser could implement a change, and the non-standard site stops working.

Then someone pointed group members to Google's Web Authoring Statistics. I've read some of the earlier studies that they quote, and I was fascinated by those results. But Google's results really point out the wide variations used in Web sites today. They analyzed just over a billion documents for elements, classes, headers, metadata, and more.

(I disagree with one piece of information, however. The Google team states that "Most people (roughly 98%) include head, html, title and body elements. This is somewhat ironic, since three of the four elements are optional in HTML." Later, they state that title is the only required element. Given that title belongs inside the head tags, that implies that the head tag is also required. I learned long ago that all HTML pages required the html tag, and that the only time the body tag wasn't required was for frameset pages. Maybe they got the information backward, and the statement is supposed to be that only one of the four elements is optional? This doesn't work with their conclusion, though. More research is needed ;-). )

I've confirmed several speaking engagements in the last week...mark your calendars!

• STC Pittsburgh and NEO (joint), Saturday, 1 April 2006. Boardman, OH. This is an all-day event, and I'll be giving three presentations (Trends in Online Help, Introducing Windows Vista Help, and the Online Help Workshop). I'll post the link to the event as soon as I get it.
• WritersUA, 10-12 April 2006. Palm Springs. I'll be presenting two sessions during the conference: Migrating to XML/XHTML and Creating HTML Layouts without Tables.
• STC San Diego, Thursday, 13 April 2006. San Diego. I'll be speaking at the monthly chapter meeting about Vista Help.
• STC Annual Conference, 7-10 May 2006. Las Vegas. I'll also be presenting two sessions during this conference: Introducing Windows Vista Help and Creating Customized Outputs with AuthorIT.

Hope to see you at one of these events!

One of my clients has a WinHelp project that needs to be ported from RoboHelp for Word to another tool. So I've spent the last week testing the import procedures for various HATs.

Now, this is, overall, a pretty plain project. It has a lot of topics (4,021) and index entries (5,000+), not that many hyperlinks (just under 500), and no graphics. I've reformatted the Word documents, so I know that they're clean.

Import times have taken anywhere from 40 minutes to over three hours. Different issues I've run into:

• The content didn't import. (The topic headings were there, but the topics themselves were blank.)
• The formatting wasn't maintained. It was either ignored completely, or occasionally.
• Hidden text (used for comments in the original Word document) was either omitted or brought in as not hidden. (I can't decide which is worse.)
• The CNT structure was ignored. The original CNT only included 400 topics, but in several cases, they were imported as a flat list.
• The map numbers were ignored. (My idea of fun: re-entering 4000+ map numbers...NOT! ;-) )

What was also interesting was the time it took to compile the project. One HAT took anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour, 20 minutes to compile a WinHelp project. Another took 40 minutes. The original project took less than a minute, but this just points out the differences between RoboHelp for Word and the other HATs: RoboHelp always saved the raw RTF file so that it was immediately available for compilation. The other HATs have to generate the RTFs, which is where the time comes in.

I have more work to do on this...like talk to the different vendors and discover if it's my installation that is causing these problems or if these are legitimate problems that can be fixed. I'll let you know what I find out.

(And, no, I haven't forgotten about the HAT matrix. It's almost finished...but still not quite ready for publication.)