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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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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End of the day and I'm waiting forever for my Other Computer to tell me just exactly how wrong I am.  In the mean time, I figured I'd quickly share a little trick.

Wikipedia does a better job than I ever will so go read the comprehensive definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming. To summarize:

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This is an open letter to the DITA TC regarding something which is in my view a fatal flaw with the design of several DITA elements.  The realization crystalized when I was told by someone on the DITA users email list that there is no provision for users to specify captions for their exhibits (figures, tables, etc.) or specify the text of their section headings.  In short...<title> doesn't do what intuition says it will do...

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I'll be running a user clinic at UCSC with Elizabeth Wilde, from Feb 9th to March 15th. The basic idea of the clinic is to let existing DITA users share the details of their DITA deployment with other users, and get feedback both from each other and from the instructors, myself and Elizabeth Wilde.

Because of the nature of the course, in which each participant takes a turn at presenting their project, enrollment is very limited, although I think there are still some spots open. You can get more details here:

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