Webcast: Transition to XML
Simon Bate provides a planning framework for implementing an XML-based structured authoring environment.
Author: Simon Bate
From Boulder to Bangalore
When I was a high school student in Boulder, Colorado, my first job was as a stock boy in an India-imports store. The store, Hamara Dukan, stocked all sorts of handicrafts and objets d’art from India including clothing, wood carvings, brass bowls and knickknacks, hand-printed bedspreads, incense, Kashmiri boxes, and thousands of other items. After working there for a couple of years, I acquired an appreciation of the things the country produced, but was always curious about the people and what it was like to be in India.
Webcast: Localization and the DITA Open Toolkit
Out of the box, the DITA Open Toolkit (OT) looks like it’s localization-ready. It handles the XML attribute xml:lang. It contains strings for more than 50 localizations. So it would seem that all you have to do is specify the language in your DITA files and maps and you’re good to go…or are you? In this webcast, I’ll discuss some of the issues Scriptorium has encountered while generating localized output from the DITA Open Toolkit—and how we solved them.
Webcast: DITA OT essentials
In this webcast, Simon Bate provides a “gentle introduction” to the DITA Open Toolkit (OT), the standard way to generate deliverables from DITA documents. This presentation shows how anyone can install the OT. A tour of the contents and how the plugin architecture works is included.
FrameMaker, DITA, xrefs: I could tell you, but…
Modifying FrameMaker cross-reference formats: it’s basic and one of the cool things about FrameMaker. But not if you’re editing DITA files using FrameMaker 9 or 10.
Conquering the Mark of the Web (DITA OT version)
Whew! Now I know how St. George felt after slaying the dragon. I’ve defeated the Mark of the Web beast and have lived to tell about it.
Webcast: XSL techniques for XML-to-XML transformations
In this webcast, Simon Bate leads viewers through the key steps in using XSL (extensible stylesheet language) to perform XML-to-XML conversions, a process that differs from more traditional XML-to-PDF and XML-to-HTML conversions.
Using Ant to find a needle in a haystack
Many content management systems (CMSs) take over the responsibility of file naming. For the most part, this is fine and is actually necessary for maintaining cross-references and conrefs within the CMS. When you use the CMS to build a DITA map, the CMS uses its own names in the <topicref> elements.
Tech Tips: Quick Word to DITA table conversion
The other day I had to convert a large table from Word to DITA. I started looking at Word XML output and thought about transforming it with XSL (which I have done in the past), but that seemed to be too much trouble for this document. Then I remembered a technique an old SQL coder showed me for loading large amounts of data into a SQL table. I realized this technique could be readily adapted to DITA.
