Comments on: Back to DITA?

By: Weekly link roundup by Communications from DMN

Weekly link roundup by Communications from DMN — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:00:54 +0000

[...] Gordon McLean talks about reconsidering DITA. [...]

By: Gordon McLean

Gordon McLean — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:57:47 +0000

Fabrice, I always welcome discussion on these topics. That’s why I post them!

I will summarise why we are going with DITA in a separate post, and it certainly looks like I need to get a little deeper into this before we go any further.

Thanks for the info, very useful.

By: Fabrice Talbot

Fabrice Talbot — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:58:48 +0000

Great you are choosing a single-source system to manage your documentation.

Based on the comments thread I would like to add some stuff for thought:

“based on a content audit the migration of our legacy content matches the DITA topic structure perfectly.
”
This statement is valid for.. whole the companies in the world. DITA uses a very flexible architecure and can map anything… However the mappping for your company does not exist yet. Experts will have to do the wrok ($$$). My advice: ask your partner how much it will cost to do the mapping and how long it will take…

“I DO NOT WANT to spend time ‘tweaking’ code for layout.”
Makes sense :-) However, both DITA and Docbook use stylesheets to render the final output. So these stylesheets will have to be created and/or tweaked.

You may also be interested in this article that compares Docbook and DITA: http://www.livetechdocs.com/blog/?p=6

Please don’t take me wrong. I am sure you have good reasons to go for DITA. I just wanted to bring a neutral input to the discussion.

Good luck with your migration to DITA!

By: Gordon McLean

Gordon McLean — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:08:14 +0000

Dorothy, thanks for all those details, very good of you to share.

You touch on something I agree with, namely that the products aren’t quite there yet but are probably close enough that the effort required to get a solution in place is worthwhile.

I’ll look into DocZone.

By: Dorothy Hoskins

Dorothy Hoskins — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:27:14 +0000

We are piloting the DocZone solution for DITA CMS, XML authoring and translation workflows soon. While we are awaiting their software-as-a-service implementation, we needed to continue developing some content in Arbortext. We have to edit hrefs that Arbortext Editor inserts to remove the complete file paths (we want them to be relative, not absolute). Then we have the problem of getting the PDF and HTML output we want — haven’t gotten into how to get AE to do that yet.
I have also investigated importing DITA content created outside of FrameMaker into FM 8 and it works pretty well, so you can style the page layout and tweak the typography in it just like any other FM documents. See http://2007.xmlconference.org/public/asset/attachment/281. You can build an FM .book from a ditamap and then print that to PDF with all the bells and whistles. But for HTML you have to install a plug-in to FM to run the Open Toolkit, which is not very friendly. I have turned to Hyperwrite WinANT by Tony Self for my HTML output.
So while there is progress, so far it’s been kind of half-hearted from the XML authoring application vendors. We hope that DocZone will give us a seamless authoring-to-publishing capability (Xopus is included for writing XML and TopLeaf is integrated for PDF output). But in that case you are using their CMS as a service, so you have to decide if that works for your situation.
It is a mixed environment — I think the next year or so will bring some really good products to market in the DITA space, but meanwhile there’s work to do, so we just find the tools we can and get the job done.