Using DITA without becoming a Geek

What They Won't Tell You About DITA

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Using the DITA XML standard can bring enormous improvements in the efficiency of localizing documentation. Some organizations report efficiency gains of 30-50% over traditional desktop publishing systems, and use the savings to expand further into global markets. This session gives a practical set of steps and guidelines for delivering your content smoothly and quickly in multiple languages. We will cover how to mark up content, how localization affects reuse, how to work with translators, and issues in generating localized deliverables. You'll learn about the big picture of how translation works in DITA, what steps you need to include in your process in order to get high-quality results, and exactly how to avoid common pitfalls that tend to make localization tricky.

Putting DITA Localization into Practice

XMetaL

Localization and DITA: What you Need to Know - LocWorld32

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TC Dojo Open Session: Are You Getting the Most Out of DITA Content Reuse?

Presented by Alex Kozaris, IXIASOFT IT Specialist at the IXIASOFT User Conference 2016. Murphy’s Law says that if something can go wrong, it will. But don’t let Murphy tell you what to do; instead come to this presentation where Alex will take you through effective troubleshooting procedures for the issues that he commonly sees with his extensive experience of solving issues involving the IXIASOFT DITA CMS.

Introduction to DITA

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Domain Driven Design (DDD)

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What’s new in DITA 1.3? by Yas Etessam, DITA Consultant and Leigh White, DITA Specialist at IXIASOFT Come and learn about the new proposed DITA 1.3 features. Leigh and Yas will provide an overview of the new architectural features including extensions to the DITA core vocabulary, Online Help vocabularies, scoped keys, branched filtering and enhancements to the Learning and Training, Troubleshooting and Table specializations.

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The switch to DITA is often justified using a business plan based on the expected Return On Investment (ROI). However, DITA metrics aren't just about cost savings. They are also extremely valuable in evaluating and optimizing your production process as they can help you answer the following questions: • Is your content effectively serving your audiences? • Is reuse optimal? • What are the ongoing content costs? In this session, you will learn: • How to set the right metrics for your organization • How to use DITA metrics beyond cost savings • How DITA metrics can contribute to a continual improvement process

Metrics for continual improvements - Nolwenn Kerzreho LavaconDublin2016

My goal with this document was to guide someone through the basic functions for Techsmith Snagit. My main challenge was to instruct in a manner that was highly comprehensively and allowed for contingences where the reader may have become confused and stuck. I provided visual cues that illustrate what was being taught and provided opportunities for the reader to explore and develop their skills with the application.

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Presented by Neil Perlin at Documentation and Training West, May 6-9, 2008 in Vancouver, BC. With two releases of RoboHelp in 2007, Adobe is working to restore its place in the help authoring world after several uncertain years. If you’’re a RoboHelp X5 user who’s been waiting to see where RoboHelp was going, come to this workshop. Version 7 offers the most significant interface changes in years, and some significant new features. Plus you can use it with Captivate and Acrobat to build multi-modal help. This workshop offers a hands-on overview where you’’ll use RoboHelp 7 to create a simple help system and look at its integration with the rest of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite.

An Overview of RoboHelp 7

Scott Abel

Join Keith Schengili-Roberts, IXIASOFT DITA Specialist, and the LavaCon crew, for a free webinar on Thursday, September 8, 2016 to learn more about optimizing content reuse with DITA. Just click on the gotowebinar link above to register - it's free! Optimizing Content Reuse with DITA DITA was designed around the idea of content reuse. Maps, topics, conrefs and keys all provide the means for sharing and reusing content effectively within a documentation team using the standard. But what are the optimal ways of doing this, and what are the common mistakes first-time DITA users make when it comes to content reuse? Did you know that DITA 1.3 offers up additional means for reusing content via using such things as scoped keys? And what good is content reuse if you can’t find the content you are looking for? In this presentation IXIASOFT’s DITA Specialist Keith Schengili-Roberts will examine content reuse best practices, and look at how the idea of content reuse has evolved, changed and been refined since DITA first debuted over ten years ago. Webinar hosted by LavaCon, Sponsored by IXIASOFT.

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Once you’ve convinced an employer that you know how to write, can play well with others, and are curious about technology, you need to demonstrate your mastery of the authoring tools they require on the job. But which authoring tools should you master? Jeff Haas, past president of STC Atlanta, discusses the tools that are currently in demand and the ones that are likely to be in demand in the very near future.

Cool Tools for Technical Writers

Jeff Haas

Is your technical content development organization considering a move to structured authoring and/or DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)? This presentation provides a high-level introduction to what DITA is--and what the benefits of moving to DITA are. DITA is an excellent solution for many--but not all--organizations and projects. This introduction can help you begin to understand why DITA may or may not be a good solution for you.

What is DITA? And Is It Right for Your Team or Project?

Toni Mantych, MA, PMP

DITA 1.3: What's New and Different

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Presented by Kristen James Eberlein at the IXIASOFT User Conference 2015. Panel with Keith Schengili-Roberts, IXIASOFT DITA Information Architect, Kristen James Eberlein, DITA Specialist and Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee, Yan Periard, and Leigh W. White This panel presentation will discuss the features of the IXIASOFT DITA CMS related to DITA 1.3. Panellists will describe the key new enhancements coming with DITA 1.3, and the features within the DITA CMS that will support them. This session will explore not only the implications of DITA 1.3 for content creators and information architects, but the role that IXIASOFT plays in guiding the development of the standard as a member of OASIS, and the types of features IXIASOFT is working on to support this significant update to the standard.

Overview of DITA 1.3

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Alan Houser, Group Wellesley -- Through effective task analysis and information modeling, organizations can maximize the usability of their technical documentation while minimizing the required development and maintenance effort. During this interactive workshop, students will learn the principles of minimalist documentation, how to perform an effective task and topic analysis, approaches to migrating legacy documentation to DITA or other information models, and methods for mapping content to pre-defined information types. We will also use software tools to assist in performing topic analysis. While this workshop will use DITA information models as examples, the workshop will provide value for anybody who needs to move to a structured authoring environment and improve the usability and maintainability of their technical documentation. In many organizations, writers are judged by the volume of content that they produce. The larger the manual or help system, the more effective the writer. A fatter manual is considered to be a better manual. From the users perspective, however, fatter does not mean better. There is no positive correlation between page or topic count and usability. Large documentation sets may be intimidating and are likely to present usability issues. Furthermore, higher page or topic counts mean higher maintenance, translation, and production costs. The minimalist documentation strategy provides a way to design and deliver highly usable documentation while minimizing the amount of content that must be developed, maintained, and produced to support a product or service. The increasingly-popular DITA information architecture is based on the concepts of minimalist documentation. During this workshop, we will learn the principles of minimalist documentation, and how minimalist documentation strategies meet both user needs and business needs. We will learn how to design minimalist documentation using the DITA information architecture. We will interactively experience the important prerequisite of task and topic analysis for creating well-designed, highly usable minimalist documentation sets. We will also demonstrate the use of software tools to support topic analysis. In an interactive session, we will use the IBM Task Modeler to develop a task analysis for a product or service. The instructor will demonstrate how to use the IBM Task Modeler to automatically generate DITA map files and prototype DITA-based output.

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Drupal is modular, reusable and open source, but that's not the case for it's documentation. The documentation in code falls under the GPL license and we have a few angels that contribute to our community documentation but on the documentation that we make for our users and customers we are failing to collaborate. In this presentation I'll explain how we could turn documentation for open source projects into modular, reusable units on which we can collaborate. I'll explain what single sourcing is and how we could use it to make different types of documentation (e.g. manuals, help, training materials, training curricula, etc.) for different types of audiences from a single set of documents. I'll give an introduction to DITA (Darwin Information Type Architecture), an Oasis XML standard started at IBM and how it's used in industries with modular products to publish documentation in a range of formats in minutes in stead of days while saving up to 60% of translation costs. I'll also give a demonstration of the DITA Drupal module and explain how we want to make Drupal a platform for community authored DITA documentation that does not require knowledge about DITA from it's contributors.

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Content Management Systems for technical documentation can be expensive and do not provide a magical solution to all your reuse problems. Often, going through the excercise of building your own custom CMS helps you define your set of requirements, so you will be much better prepared to purchase the exact right CMS for you a couple of years down the road. Building your own CMS based on structured FrameMaker is not a very difficult task and teaches you a lot about all the possible issues when starting with modular documentation and reuse.

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When designing software, we often need to solve numerous instances of the same problem. When designing user-interfaces, we need to describe the layout and interaction. When financial systems, we need to describe a wide range of financial contracts or, for example, recognize different patterns in price change. Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) give us a way to solve such repeating problems. By designing a composable functional library, we can build an expressive language for describing our problems. Using the flexible F# syntax, we can get code that even non-programmers can understand. In this practically oriented talk, we'll develop a number of sample DSLs, ending with realistic examples. We'll cover both basic principles of DSL design as well as advanced tricks, such as using the F# 3.0 query syntax.

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This short presentation shows how a homegrown flowchart editor, running in a web browser, can be used to design DITA tasks. Instead of painstakingly editing the steps and choice tables, linking them by cross-references, just draw a flowchart and connect its building blocks. Let the software transform your design into a valid and correct DITA task. Of course, you can also skip the DITA and go for interactive HTML5 plus JavaScript.

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Minimalism in technical documentation ultimately leads to using interactive procedures. The advantages of moving control from the user's head to a connected device are countless. But there has to be an easier way of building these so-called information apps (or procedure apps). This presentation shows how the implicit flowchart the designers have in their minds when writing a procedure can be made explicit in a graphical interface, which produces the HTML5 code. Easy design, easy error correction, no more reasons to not use procedures instead of relying on service manuals, training service staff, and the absence of stress on the work floor, where safety-critical procedures are required.

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Creating links in technical content greatly supports the user experience, but as technical content evolves, such links are getting harder to handle. Creating static links that are resolved while building the output will not work out in the end, as content creation is moving into the agile world. This is where a new paradigm is required, which enables authors to create semantically defined links, which will be resolved by querying the database of available topics, during runtime. This revolutionises the way we think about cross-references and hyperlinks.

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Minimalism in technical documentation states that we should only deliver info that the user needs. But how can we know what each individual user already knows (and does not need)? The answer is: we cannot. And this is why we should use progressive disclosure techniques to optimize the help we offer to our customers, so that each individual customer can decide for himself whether more info is needed or not, and on which aspects more info is needed. There is one important catch: Implementing progressive disclosure can be a lot of work and be too costly to do. The solution to this budgetary problem is to use a well-defined structure in your content (preferably DITA) and an XSLT that automatically adds the required hooks and handles (triggers and targets) to make progressive disclosure work.

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XSLT allows you to transform the structure of XML files into anything you need. As structured FrameMaker is not exactly XML but follows the same structured design, the capabilities of XSLT within the FrameMaker environment can be very useful. The FrameSLT plug-in produced by West Street Consulting offers this functionality at a very low price. This presentation gives an introduction to what the tool can do, and what it means to do transformations of structure in technical documents.

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Publications in DITA are handled via dita maps. Even with conditions and DITAVAL options, these are inherently static and bound to an old book type paradigm. In this presentation I am trying to outline a new paradigm, where the disclosure of information is made truly dynamic. Doing away with maps or at least with one single top-level map that defines all content. Having a dynamic information disclosure layer in place may prepare our technical content for the fast-moving world of today (which will move even faster tomorrow).

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Having well-formatted content available in FrameMaker enables you to automatically convert that content to structured FrameMaker (and then possibly moving it into XML). Automating the entire process is possible using a combination of preprocessing (with FrameMaker's built-in ExtendScript), smart conversion tables and post-processing (using FrameSLT, a low-cost plug-in for FrameMaker and some more ExtendScript). This tutorial outlines some of the tricks and tips that will get you started.

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Diese Präsentation zeigt, wie Minimalismus in technische Dokumentation letztendlich zu eine Technik führt, die sich auf English "Progressive Disclosure" nennt und am Besten als "fortschreitende Offenlegung" übersetzt werden kann. Warum Progressive Disclosure wichtig ist und wie es handmässig oder auch automatisiert gemacht wird (falls die Inhalte in einer vernünftig strukturierten Form vorliegen).

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This presentation is a reworked version of a joint presentation with a customer at TCWorld in Germany 2012. It shows how the transition from unstructured documentation to the modern world of structured, XML-based and topic-oriented authoring can be made smooth, without interfering with the publication chain. This presentation describes a project that was done using FrameMaker 10 with its built-in ExtendScript toolkit. It shows how being able to mix unstructured and structured content, including a DITA-type conref mechanism, can be used to keep the system running while the materials are converted and pushed into a repository for reuse one by one. This flattens the legacy documentation hurdle that may keep companies from moving to modern authoring practices.

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In this presentation at DITA Europe 2012, I try to outline a new paradigm for thinking about change impact in heavy reuse environments. I take my inspiration from the world of CAD engineering, which has been working with large numbers of reuse items and heavy interdependencies between those items for decades. Possbily, documentation designers need to start learning something from CAD engineering best practices.

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