In this exclusive TheContentWrangler.com interview with Rick Schochler of Innodata Isogen, Scott Abel talks to Rick about his company’s experience working with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). While he and his firm see DITA as an excellent “option” for some organizations, he advises readers to maintain a “healthy skepticism” when it comes to software tools and their “support” for DITA. “Some day we’ll have tools that will provide some default functionality,” Schochler says. For those who, for whatever business reasons, decide not to move to DITA, Schochler has this advice: “Get your data in a tool-neutral format (XML), then choose the content structure approach that best fits your requirements.”

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You get the defiant flavor of the conference from its slogan: "There is nothing so practical as a good theory."  The attendees readily voice disagreement with speakers or even confess
incomprehension (with rare candor) because they care about the result.  They want it to work right. Some of the attendees were in on the cultivation of markup as a concept, so they get markup as only those who saw the bare dirt can.

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JoAnn Hackos invited me to the reception at the opening of her DITA Boot Camp in Wakefield, MA last  week.

It was a privilege to meet the contributor of so many methods and techniques to the field of technical writing, including minimalism and single-source publishing.

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In this exclusive TheContentWrangler.com interview, Scott Abel interviews Chip Gettinger, VP Services and Sales Support at Astoria Software, an XML content management software vendor, about his company’s experience moving to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Gettinger says of DITA, “It’s all about reducing the time, cost and risk associated with producing content.” Read the interview to learn how Astoria is using DITA to produce software manuals, online help and other deliverables.

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Although I have a lot of experience with HTML and XML, I only recently began working with a technical documentation team that has begun looking into DITA as a possible future direction.

Our current documents are primarily in Framemaker and Word.  Robohelp is used for online help topics.  PDFs are used for distributable files.  We have an increasing need to also post content on the web.

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