In his OneManWrites blog, Gordon McLean writes, "I think the DITA standard is an excellent one for software documentation and the DITA movement is slowly catching up to the hype. I’ve never given up on DITA and had always planned to use it as the basis for the next stage of our content development, and as it happens the switch to a full DITA/CMS based solution may be closer than I had anticipated.

We have been considering how best to publish up to date information in keeping with patches and minor releases, and if we can tidy up and publish useful information from our internal Wikis and support system. The nature of the product we work with means there are a lot of different usage patterns, not all of which we would document as they fall outwith typical (common) usage.

So, how to publish formal product documentation, in-line with three versions of the product, in PDF for ‘printed’ manuals, JavaHelp to be added to our product, and HTML to be published to a live website alongside other technical content (ideally maintained in the same system as the product documentation). Storing the content as XML chunks also allows us to further re-use the content programmatically (which can be tied into our product in a smarter, dynamic, fashion).

The obvious answer is single source using DITA to structure the content, storing the content as XML to give us the greatest potential avenues for re-use. Nothing particularly startling there I know, but it’s a switch from the direction we had been considering. So I’ve been catching up on what’s new in DITA-land and have to admit I’m a little disappointed."

Read the complete blog at OneManWrites.