Webcast: The State of Structure, 2011
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the results of Scriptorium’s 2011 survey on structured authoring. Topics include adoption rates, tools, implementation costs, lessons learned, and much more.
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the results of Scriptorium’s 2011 survey on structured authoring. Topics include adoption rates, tools, implementation costs, lessons learned, and much more.
Most of the DITA work that we do at Scriptorium is “full-on” implementation. That is, our customer decides to move their content from [something that is not DITA] to a DITA-based system. There are variations on the theme, of course, but nearly all of our customers are concerned about managing localization costs and increasing content reuse.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides an XML architecture for technical communication. Although implementing DITA is likely to be faster and easier than building your own XML architecture from the ground up, DITA is not suitable for everyone.
Scriptorium hosts Tristan Bishop of Symantec as he discusses what technical writers need to do to keep up with transforming communication methods and rapid advances in global, mobile, and social dialog.
Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf asks: How important is video to technical authors?
Graham argues you cannot afford to ignore video.
Getting attractive PDF output out of XML is a serious technical challenge. But in some organizations, the PDF requirement is being used to prevent to unwanted workflow changes.
Technical communication and technical support should be allies. After all, tech support needs the information that tech comm produces. Tech comm often has only limited customer contact; tech support has oodles of daily customer contact.
And yet, there is a common organizational pattern where tech comm and tech support are in conflict.
In this webcast, Nicky Bleiel of ComponentOne and I discuss trends for tech comm in the upcoming year.
published in STC Intercom, March 2011
A standards-based workflow is challenging. This article discusses the issues with DITA (an XML standard for technical communication content) and XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects, a standard used to create PDF from XML (http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/publishing).