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.
Webcast: Crafting Clarity in a Climate of Chaos
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.
Video has not killed the tech comm star
Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf asks: How important is video to technical authors?
Graham argues you cannot afford to ignore video.
The PDF roadblock
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.
Pitting tech comm and tech support against each other
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.
It’s not easy being…clean
This article was originally published in STC Intercom in March of 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).
Webcast: DITA Best Practices
In this webcast hosted by Scriptorium, author Tony Self discusses his new book, The DITA Style Guide, and how it fits into a DITA workflow.
The battle to separate the personal and the professional
Social media is inexorably coalescing our personal and professional identities. What happens when baby pictures, political views, drinking habits, and hobbies collide with your corporate persona?
