Archive - 2009

Jangli

DITA adoption: statistics needed

Hello all,

I am preparing a half-day seminar on DITA for documentation managers and I want to stay away from all the technical details - as that will definitely scare them off. Instead, I need to talk business to them. I can invent business cases or find them through documentation companies I work with, but I would like to find statistics on what is spent on documentation and translation by large companies, just to give a background of the potential return on investment that we are talking about.

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Increase Publishing Efficiency from Author to Customer - Presented by Mark Poston

Location: 
http://www.x-pubs.com/site/news/1625/
Date: 
2 Apr 2009 - 15:00
Event Type: 
Conference

Michael Priestley

DITA doclet - generate DITA API format docs from Java source

This article got published on developerWorks last month:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-DITAdoclet/

This should be of interest to anyone who has generated Javadoc in the past but wished they could get a more semantic, reprocessable format output instead. The doclet produces content using the DITA API specialization, which can be processed with the DITA Open Toolkit. Note that it includes the actual doclet code in the resources section, so you can try this yourself at home.

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attribution/source/byline

Some of the definitions in a definition-list have clearly-defined attributions, for example ISO. It seems logical, if the goal is to produced a set of structured and searchable files, to use something like

[dlentry]

[dt]name of term goes here[/dt]

[dd]definition of term goes here

[source]attribution goes here[/source]

[/dd]

[/dlentry]

[source] is clearly not the element to use here, though; nor is [author].

Any suggestions?

lists and their introductions

Typographically, a paragraph is one thing and a list is another - even if the content of the paragraph is nothing than more the lead-in to the list. That would suggest something like [paragraph] [/paragraph] [ul] [/ul]

Logically, the introductory paragraph and the list form a unit of information. That would suggest something like [paragraph] [ul] [/ul] [/paragraph].

The 1.1 language spec. I have to hand appears to allow both. What do you experienced users think?

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