Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 31, we discuss use cases for the DITA standard and how its adoption has spread beyond product content. What industries are using DITA and for what kinds of content?
In this podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow discuss various industries adopting the DITA standard and what kinds of content they produce.
We usually think of DITA as a solution for product-focused content development. More specifically, it’s used for developing customer-facing technical documentation and training content. And, as marketing and technical content have converged to deliver a more unified product content experience, DITA has served that need as well.
But what about content needs beyond products?
00:00 Bill Swallow: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 19, we discuss best practices for localizing DITA content.
There are special considerations when localizing DITA content. In this podcast, Bill Swallow and Simon Bate discuss the conventions available in DITA for localization, and share anecdotes and advice to help you circumvent localization problems.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Back in 2011, I wrote a post on how to calculate the ROI of DITA.
Out of the box, the DITA Open Toolkit (OT) looks as though it’s localization-ready. The HTML and PDF plugins contain strings for over 50 languages. 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 podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe discuss DITA specialization, or the process of creating new structures from existing ones. What is involved in developing and testing a DITA specialization? What are some risks and benefits you should consider before specializing your DITA content?
Open standards are great—until you realize that the standard is almost-but-not-quite perfect for your requirements. Then you face ugly choices: do you compromise by forcing your elliptical content into the round standard, or customize the standard to make it just right? Some companies join the standards-making body, and eventually get their requirements added to the standard.
Scriptorium is hosting a live, interactive question and answer session about the authoring courses on LearningDITA.com! Whether you want to go over a specific exercise or you just need some help getting started, bring your questions and join us for the discussion.
