The JoAnn Hackos Workshop Series announces the Advanced DITA Training including DITA 1.2 in San Mateo, CA, July 20-21, 2010, taught by Hal Trent.

The Advanced DITA workshop will provide attendees with a hands-on walk-through of the essential DITA fundamentals, programming skills, and DITA Open Toolkit configurations required to assemble, style, and publish DITA XML source.

After a brief overview of the DITA framework, course lectures and exercises will focus on the key pieces of a DITA publishing architecture, how to set it up, and how to optimize its publishing capabilities using customizations and plug-ins. Attendees will learn to set up a publishing architecture using the DITA-OT pipeline and learn how to configure and debug the DITA-OT.

With the publishing architecture set up and configured, participants will then be introduced to the programming skills required to customize and optimize the publishing architecture. Practical exercises will encompass all of the programming and markup languages needed to transform and format DITA XML for PDF and web output. Languages will include XSLT, XPath, XSL-FO, XHTML, and CSS.

The course will conclude with an overview of the upcoming DITA 1.2 specification and potential ramifications for the publishing architecture. Participants will learn about key features of the new specification as they relate to publishing, including keyref, conref push, constraints, and subject scheme maps. Exercises will focus on reuse and conditional processing using the keyref mechanism.