Content monoculture
I’m having some trouble with the idea of “extending DITA” outside the world of technical communication. DITA is obviously important in the right environment, but should we be advocating the use of DITA for more and more content?
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.
Vector images and the DITA Open Toolkit
Rendering vector images (such as line art or charts) for PDF output through the DITA Open Toolkit can be tricky. You would think that an exported GIF of a vector image would display beautifully in the PDF—but you would be wrong.
A simple use case for DITA conkeyrefs
I have struggled to understand the keyref and conkeyref features added in DITA 1.2.
It wasn’t until we started applying them to our proposal workflow that I finally understood them. I hope this use case also helps others.
Top 10 signs that documentation is craptacular
“Content is an asset worthy of being managed,” says Scott Abel. I agree that good content is an asset. Bad content is a liability. It’s time to talk about the shameful underbelly of technical communication.
Dear Verizon call center
My voice mail randomly bailed on me, and after much Googling and forum snooping, I still couldn’t get it to cooperate. I couldn’t log in, and no one could leave me a message. So, I went down to the Verizon store, intent on giving the (very friendly) folks there a piece of my mind.
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.
The devolution of DITA editors
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.
Calculating the ROI of DITA
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.
