DITA Newsletter Volume 1, Issue 2, September, 2007
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Features in this issue (see the web version at www.ditanewsletter.com)

 

• DITA User Group Meetings
• Don Day's Open Toolkit Resources Page
• Apache FOP 0.94 released
• SecondLife DITA Island First Meeting - September 4
• KM World Magazine Names DITA Trend-Setters
• Idiom Technologies Releases WorldServer 9
• Do You Blog on DITA?
• Upcoming DITA Events

DITA User Group Meetings Boston DITA User Group, September 10

Topic: Content Migration with DITA at PTC

PTC will tell us how they migrated corporate documentation to DITA
following the acquisition last year of Arbortext. This presentation
will present a case study of how and why PTC’s technical writers
changed their process and learned new skills leveraging XML, DITA, and
Content Management.

Speakers: Jay Dupont, Product Manager, and Paula Ploetz, Senior Technical Writer, PTC

Date: Monday, September 10, 2007 @ 6:30-8:30 pm EDT

The meeting starts with light snacks and networking at 6:30PM.
The presentation starts at 7PM.

We meet at PTC Headquarters in Needham, MA
140 Kendrick St
Needham, MA 02494

Please RSVP to editor@cmsreview.com Silicon Valley DITA Interest Group, September 12

Topic: Making the most of DITA Users.org (and a tour of the DITA Infocenter and DITA Wiki).

Speaker: Bob Doyle, Founder of DITA Users, President and CEO of skyBuilders, (and many others).

Date: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 @ 7:00-9:00 pm PDT

Location: NetAppliance. 495 E. Java Drive
Bldg 3, Santa Cruz conference room
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
(Google Map)

Meet promptly at 7:00PM in the lobby to be escorted in. Jim Bond will be our official NetAppliance escort.

Watch the DITA.XML.org User Groups page for future meetings.

Don Day's New Open Toolkit Resources Page Don Day, chairman of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, has created a resources page with tips for Open Toolkit users.

Don describes package download options and plugin downloads.

While editing Wikipedia pages on DITA, Bob Doyle created a DITA Open Toolkit Wikipedia page, which points to Don's new page. Apache FOP 0.94 released The Apache XML Graphics team announced the release of Apache FOP version 0.94.

This is the second production-level release after a big re-design effort. It includes many bug fixes and new features, the most important being:

• auto-detection of the fonts installed on the system; the XML metrics generation is now optional
• support for the collapsing-border model in tables;
• internal links in PDF now point to the exact location, and not to the top of the page;
• support for UAX#14 type line breaking. This annex of the Unicode standard specifies rules for breaking text into lines depending on the language used.

The complete list of changes is available at Apache.org SecondLife DITA Island First meeting September 4 Consider joining SecondLife, getting yourself an avatar, and attending these virtual meetings of DITA enthusiasts organized by DITA Technical Committee member Christian Kravogel.

We can talk to one another using VoIP on his DITA Island in SecondLife. All you need is a good headset with boom microphone for free conversation with DITA users all over the real world.

Chris holds regular meetings Tuesdays on SecondLife.

You will need to take four tutorials in the orientation center that train you to walk around - and fly around! Then you can teleport to DITA Island and the DITA conference center with a large screen display showing presentations on DITA.

Tuesday 4th to Wednesday 5th at
9:00 - 10:00 pm PT/PDT
12:00 - 1:00 am ET/EDT (midnight)
6:00 - 7:00 am CET/CEDT (early morning)

SIM Address at Secondlife: DITA (185, 132, 27)
Or send an IM to the Chris' avatar: Seico Flanagan

KM World Magazine Names Four DITA-related "Trend-Setting Products of 2007" In the annual roundup of top products for content, document, and knowledge management, KM World includes these vendors who work with DITA.

• Astoria Astoria On-Demand — delivers solutions that leverage and extend XML-based, DITA-compliant content management for dynamic publishing.

   

• DocZone — hosted XML content management and single-source publishing solution.

   

• PTC Arbortext—enterprise publishing software supporting the entire enterprise publishing process, from creation through delivery.

   

• XyEnterprise Contenta—manages the life cycle of creating, maintaining and delivering content through multiple channels; users can dynamically create, reuse, manage and assemble multilingual XML content and documents.

Idiom® Technologies Releases WorldServer™ 9 With WorldServer 9, Idiom focused on several key areas: Quality and Collaboration, Global Terminology Lifecycle Management, TransPort, and Machine Translation Integration. Additionally, several TM and Usability enhancements were implemented.

WorldServer 9 leverages full workflow functionality, along with a new UI and term status tracking, to manage the complete global terminology lifecycle from adding new terms, approving terms, and possible term deprecation.

WorldServer 9 introduces WorldServer TransPort, a next-generation translation portal that replaces WorldServer ServiceDesk.

WorldServer 9 provides tight integration between various machine translation systems and WorldServer. The results from the machine translation engine seamlessly flow into scoping, costing, and translation.

Idiom offers a webinar - WorldServer 9: New Features and Functionality - on Wednesday, September 12th, by Andrew Thomas, Enterprise Product Manager. Register now

Do You Blog on DITA? We recently added Katriel Reichman's Accelerated Authoring blog and Eric Armstrong's Cool Stuff blog to our blogroll at DITA Blog.

We also added them to the bloggers that get aggregated on the home page of DITA News.

If you blog on DITA, we would like to add you as well.

Please send us a URL to your DITA Blog (editor at cmsreview.com).

Upcoming DITA Events

 

September 17-19, 2007 JoAnn Hackos will hold her 9th Annual Best Practices Conference, in Atlanta Georgia. The focus is on content created with company blogs, wikis, and listservs, in addition to the normal documentation and help centers. Customers are finding more things about companies from Google searches than from authorized web portals. Find out how to get the new collaboratively created content under control.

http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/bestpractices/2007/index.htm

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount. October 2-3, 2007 JoAnn Hackos Workshop on Minimalism: Creating Manuals People Can Use, in Austin, TX.

Information developers everywhere are being told to cut the volume, reduce costs for translation, make information more easily accessible, and provide only what audiences need to know. The Minimalism workshop gives you specific guidelines for evaluating your information and making the right decisions to reduce the volume. But the Minimalism workshop is not about cutting the verbiage alone. We focus on what readers really need to know. Taught by Bill Gearhart.

http://www.comtech-serv.com/workshops/index.shtml or call 303-232-7586.

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount. October 4-6, 2007 DITA East 2007, in Raleigh, North Carolina. DITA 2007™-East, the third BrightPath North American conference of DITA users, brings together experts from around the globe for a conference designed to help attendees leverage the power of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture OASIS Standard.

http://www.travelthepath.com/conf/ditaeast.shtml

DITA Users members receive a 10% member registration discount using code DITA USERS. October 9-10, 2007 Managing Your Documentation Projects, in Golden, Colorado. How will we meet the deadline for the project? Our staff is stretched to the limit. Can we maintain our quality standards without stressing everyone? The Managing Documentation Projects workshop gives you the tools to maintain your sanity and still get the work done.

Information planning, resource and schedule estimating, project tracking, and content planning activities in the workshop give you the information you need to communicate with management and define a documentation project that meets deadlines, maintains quality, and works within resource constraints. Taught by Bill Gearhart and Bill Hackos.

http://www.comtech-serv.com/workshops/index.shtml or call 303-232-7586.

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount. October 16-20, 2007 DocTrain East 2007 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The theme of the 8th Annual Documentation & Training East Conference is Advancing Your Career. The event is designed to help you improve the skills and expertise you’ll need to future proof your career and improve your value as a professional technical communicator.

Register today

DITA Users members contact Eileen Savary at lovonya@comtech-serv.com (or call +1 978-649-8555) to receive a $200 member discount for new registrations before September 17. October 22-26, 2007 JoAnn Hackos will hold her DITA Boot Camp in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Hosted by XyEnterprise

In the DITA Boot Camp program you'll get the core values of

• Structured Authoring
• Information Modeling
• Minimalism
• Business process change
• DITA details and implementation

This workshop includes a complimentary copy of the Introduction to DITA: A Basic User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture book.

Taught by JoAnn Hackos.

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount. See the DITA News Events Calendar for more events. About DITA Newsletter DITA Newsletter is published by DITA News, one of a network of websites in support of DITA. It will be available online at www.ditanewsletter.com. Each of our websites is optimized for some community-oriented function. DITA Users - helping members get started with topic-based authoring using a web-based editor (DITA Storm), the Open Toolkit on the server, a personal workspace folder on the web, and a private member directory to locate other DITA Users.
ditausers.org

DITA Infocenter - the DITA architectural and language specifications, and the OT User Guide, in an Eclipse Help format.
ditainfocenter.com

DITA News - a blog aggregator, a mailing list, and this newsletter on DITA.
ditanews.com

DITA Blog - a group blog for DITA information developers (based on WordPress).
ditablog.com

DITA Wiki - over 600 pages of resources in a format that encourages comments and discussions (based on MediaWiki).
ditawiki.org

and a couple of other sites to come soon, including

DITA Tutor - a set of self-paced and instructor-led DITA Tutorials (based on a Moodle LMS)
ditatutor.com

Please consider joining DITA Users today. Membership is $100USD/year. Discounts on DITA conferences and workshops more than offset the annual membership fee http://www.ditausers.org/membership/how_to_join/