Scriptorium frequently offers webcasts on a variety of tools, technologies, and trends in technology and publishing. You’ll find recordings of past webinars on this page. Want to know what’s coming up next? Check out our events page.

DITA features in oXygen XML editor (61 minutes)
Presented February 16, 2010
by Simon Bate

This webcast offers an overview of the oXygen XML editor and demonstrates DITA-specific features, including inserting cross-references and conrefs, working with map files, applying conditions, and generating output.

DITA features in MadCap Flare (42 minutes)
Presented January 19, 2010
by Sarah O’Keefe

This webcast demonstrates how MadCap Flare supports DITA constructs, including mapfiles, conrefs, and relationship tables. The demo also covers exporting existing Flare projects to DITA.

Strategies for coping with user generated content (54 minutes)
Presented December 8, 2009
by Sarah O’Keefe

Publishing is no longer restricted to a few technical writers—any user can now contribute information. But the information coming from users tends to be highly specific. The two types of information can coexist and improve the overall user experience. User-generated content also offers an opportunity for technical writers to participate as curators—by evaluating and organizing the information provided by end users.

Cost-effective document design for a translation workflow (27 minutes)
Presented November 19, 2009
by Nick Rosenthal

In this webcast, Nick Rosenthal discusses the challenges companies face when translating their content and offers some “best practices” to managing your localization budget effectively, including XML-based workflows and ways to integrate localized screen shots into translated user guides or help systems.

Dynamic text display: a space-saving alternative to conditional processing (60 minutes)
Presented October 22, 2009
by Simon Bate

In this webcast, we’ll show you how we used the DITA Open Toolkit to create a Help set with dynamic text display. The webcast introduces some minor DITA Open Toolkit modifications and several client-side JavaScript techniques that you can use to implement dynamic text display in HTML files. Minimal programming skills necessary. Simon Bate, Senior Technical Consultant will show you want to modify and how to do it.

What do movable type and XML have in common? (32 minutes)
Presented September 22, 2009
by Sarah O’Keefe

The invention of movable type changed the economics of information, making the process of copying a book by hand obsolete. More than 500 years later, XML seems to be doing the same to desktop publishing. But where movable type changed the economics of a mechanical process—creating printed copies—XML changes the economics of content authoring, formatting, and customization.

Demystifying DITA to PDF publishing (64 minutes)
Presented September 10, 2009
by Sarah O’Keefe

Learn about your options for extracting PDF from DITA content. Includes comparison of DITA Open Toolkit, FrameMaker, and InDesign approaches.

DITA 101 (36 minutes)
Presented August 18, 2009
by Sarah O’Keefe

DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture is the new buzzword in technical communication. But why? In this webcast, you’ll learn about DITA concepts, business case, and typical scenarios where DITA is used.

Beyond documentation (41 minutes)
Presented August 5, 2009
by Ellis Pratt

In this session we will look at the future of technical writing and likely changes to the ways in which user assistance is delivered. Are we moving beyond documents? If so, what does this mean for technical communicators?

The state of structure in technical communication (49 minutes)
Presented June 16, 2009
by Sarah O’Keefe

In early 2009, Scriptorium Publishing conducted a survey to measure how and why technical communicators are adopting structured authoring. This webcast summarizes the findings of the survey.

Documentation as conversation
Presented June 9, 2009
by Anne Gentle

Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, it can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates.

Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit (86 minutes)
Presented June 4, 2009
by Simon Bate

This session introduces the changes you can make to the DITA OT to customize output for your needs. These changes include modifying OT CSS files, adding static and dynamic headers and footers, enhancing XSL transforms, and creating simple element-level specializations. Along the way, the session covers the organization of the DITA OT and describes how to create a DITA plug-in to make your modifications portable.