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How-to Change Fonts in SYDI

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I got an email from a user asking if I could change fonts in SYDI. My answer to him was; you change them.

There are two ways of doing this in SYDI both of them are easy.

The first way is to edit the script source. Open up SYDI-Server.vbs in a text editor and scroll down a bit to this section;

strFontBodyText = “Arial”
strFontHeading1 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontHeading2 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontHeading3 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontHeading4 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontTitle = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontTOC1 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontTOC2 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontTOC3 = “Trebuchet MS”
strFontHeader = “Arial”
strFontFooter = “Arial”

Just change the font names to what you want. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty by touching the code there is a fancier way of doing this too.

If you’ve used the help menu, cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs –h, you might have seen the –T option. What the Template (-T) option does is that it uses a Word Template file .dot and uses the settings from that file when writing the report for SYDI. The .dot file you choose to use can be one of your company’s template files or you can create a template just for SYDI.

To get started, run SYDI against your machine to create a word document. When the report is created, go to the Format drop down and choose “Styles and Formatting”. I’m using an English version of Word 2003 but it should be similar in other versions. From the Styles and Formatting section, change show to “Formatting in Use”. Now you can see the different formats used in the report.

Create a new word document, go the Styles and Formatting section, show “All Styles” and scroll down to Body Text, right click and select Modify, change the font to the one you want. I’ll just change the Body Text now but you can change all the ones found in “Formatting in Use” from the SYDI report.

Choose File, Save As. Change the Save as Type to “Document Template (*.dot)” and save the file as C:\SYDI\template.dot (or to your favorite directory).

To test your new template:

Cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs –TC:\sydi\template.dot

Hint: If you save the template in its default location you don’t need to specify the path when using –T.

If you’re having trouble implementing this or anything else related to SYDI, don’t hesitate to contact me.

[tags]sydi, network documentation, system administration, software, inventory[/tags]

Shortcomings of SYDI

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I like SYDI a lot and love the feedback I’m getting. There are some issues that stop it from being really useful, a big one is the ability to update the documentation. There’s been an open feature request for this since September 2004 so it’s about time this gets addressed.

The problem is when you create a Word document from SYDI-Server and then change the document, as you should to complete the documentation, you are not able to run SYDI again and keep the changes you made. In a way this limits SYDI to being more of an inventory tool compared to one which helps you with documentation.

I have started coding on SYDI-Server 2.0 where I hope to solve this in a way which might not be perfect but it should serve its purpose.

The idea I have now is that you create an XML file from SYDI-Server, use the XML file in combination with another XML file where you have the written part of the documentation.

The syntax will be something like this:

cscript.exe sydi-[coolname].vbs –xServer1.xml –sServer1_docs.xml –llang-english.xml –oServer1.doc

So in addition to being able to update the documentation you will also be able to convert the SYDI-Server XML files to DOC files which is useful in scenarios where you are not able to create the DOC files from the beginning.

As you might have noticed I’m also going to add a –l option for a language file. So provided that I get help with translation you will be able to get a DOC file in your native language. I don’t know if those offers are still valid but I have been offered help for a German and Polish translation, and I’ll probably do the Swedish one myself.

I will also try to include reporting for IIS, though this will only be for Windows Server 2003. There are a lot of new Windows Components in R2 which needs to be added to SYDI. Other than that I will add more hardware reporting and members of local groups.

[tags]sydi, network documentation, system administration, software, inventory[/tags]