Comments on: Can DITA train writers? Or does it require too much programming?

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:52:21 +0000

I’ve not come across any other ‘nice’ solutions for DITA. That’s one of the barriers for me and many others I believe.. it also goes hand in hand with Mike’s comments though.

The concentration on content is the major plus for me of single sourcing (I’d rather my writers were writing than increasing line spacing or tweak fonts).

Although recent developments with me may see me swing back round to DITA, so if I find anything I’ll be posting it, don’t worry.

By: Musings on structured, topic-oriented authoring by Communications from DMN

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:13:32 +0000

[...] Gentle posted a very interesting piece on DITA. Part opinion, part analysis, part musing this post is definitely a must [...]

By: annegentle

annegentle — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:46:12 +0000

Thanks, all for your comments.

Mike, your comment reminds me that even if the writers themselves are “over” the pretty formatting requirements and glad to be freed of formatting tedium, many writers still have business requirements from their client or employer that will dictate the “prettiness” guidelines. I agree with your sentiment, though!

Khaled, thanks for reading and commenting! One “affordable” path for decent PDF output (if you have already invested in a FrameMaker license and nice templates) is the FrameMaker Adapter plug-in as a free download with the DITA Open ToolKit. I edited the post above with a link to http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132728&package_id=220169. That plug-in could be a “poor man’s” print engine. It’s what Jen Linton and Kylene Bruski used to get the nice book output for the Introduction to DITA book. That’s the only idea for a solution that I have for you, does anyone else have suggestions?

By: Khaled Aly

Khaled Aly — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:12:16 +0000

Hi Anne

This is an excellent and informative site.

I am an ICT person who’s moving into info design and working on my XML and DITA.

I’m writing for help with an important point that you spelled out very nicely. Generating decent controllable PDF fro DITA maps? Do you know of any “affordable way.” Do we really have to spend days on writing XSL param elements to get to control the output appearance?

Thank you in advance if you considered responding to my query. And would be very interesting to discuss further issues on structured authoring.

By: Mike Hughes

Mike Hughes — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:20:29 +0000

I think one of DITA’s main strengths is its absence of “pretty” and “sleek.” It has helped me focus on content that is “relevant” and “useful.” When all you have at the time of writing is words and their semantic markups, you get down to some serious writing.

By: Kai

Kai — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:41:11 +0000

DITA or not, I can wholeheartedly recommend Barker’s book (first link above). Of all the books I’ve looked at and the half dozen or so I’ve read, it’s the most comprehensive and the most useful (to READ, as opposed to look up stuff…)

Beyond the three forms of task-oriented software documentation, he discusses process (though in less detail than Hackos’s Information Development) and tools (balancing print and online, with a bias towards print).

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:58:23 +0000

I firmly believe that DITA is the way forward. And you are correct in your assessment of my post, and we will have our own obstacles to overcome.

However we will be using DITA as the guidelines for how we create our topics (as far as we can).

Thankfully the “pretty PDFs” argument isn’t really one we are prone to here, it really is about the technical requirements (IN and OUT) of a single source system, and the implicit cost of DITA.

If a vendor was currently offering a DITA specific tool, even if the outputs were a bit naff, at reasonable cost (which includes configuration and setup) then we probably would’ve gone with that. At present it’s simply a matter of money, unfortunately.