• MadCap Does DITA
• DITA Adoption Committee
• DITA Topics Tutorial Slides
• DITA Tools from A to Z
• DITA Tools Survey
• Your D.Q. Helps Make The Business Case for DITA
• DITA Users Now Offers Three Membership Packages

MadCap Does DITA

In a 2007 EContent column, I compared MadCap Flare to Adobe RoboHelp and suggested they were moving toward XML and perhaps even DITA.

Now MadCap Software has announced a beta program and road map that will integrate DITA XML into several MadCap products, including Flare, Blaze, Analyzer, and Lingo. The suite of tools will allow creating, managing, translating, and publishing DITA content without third-party tools like the DITA Open Toolkit.

Mike Hamilton, MadCap VP of Product Management, says the new tools will work alongside any DITA tools your organization already has in place. You can import existing DITA topics or whole projects. You can analyze the content, for example locating phrases that are similar but not identical. Making phrases truly identical will enhance reuse and lower translation costs in Lingo, their integration of DITA authoring with translation memory.

This is a major move for MadCap, who has joined the OASIS Technical Committee and will help in the development of the DITA standard. The MadCap DITA initiative has three phases:

In the first phase , MadCap Software will add DITA support to four products:

• MadCap Flare, the company’s flagship product for single-source, multi-channel publishing
• MadCap Blaze, their topic-based publishing application for long-print documents
• MadCap Analyzer for reporting, analyzing and proactively suggesting improvements to content
• MadCap Lingo, their integrated authoring and translation memory system

With MadCap Flare and Blaze, authors will be able to import DITA projects and topics as raw XML content, and using the XML editor, change the style sheets to get the desired look and structure.

Authors will then have the option to publish the output as DITA content; print formats, such as Microsoft Word, DOCX and XPS or Adobe FrameMaker, PDF and AIR; and a range of HTML and XHTML online formats. MadCap’s software handles the DITA transforms, so authors don’t have to. MadCap Analyzer will work directly with DITA topics and projects to allow authors to analyze and report on the content. Similarly, MadCap Lingo will import data directly from DITA topics and projects, so that it can be translated. The translated material can be published as DITA content or exported to a Flare or Blaze project.

In the second phase, MadCap will enable authors to natively create and edit DITA topics in Flare and Blaze, as well as MadCap X-Edit, MadCap’s software family for creating short documents, contributing content to other documents, and reviewing content. Like Flare and Blaze, X-Edit will also support the ability to import and publish DITA information.

In the third phase, MadCap will add DITA support to its forthcoming MadCap Team Server. This will make it possible to manage and share DITA content across teams and projects, as well as schedule DITA publishing.

Here is a diagram showing possible workflows:

OASIS DITA Adoption Committee

The OASIS Adoption Committee has been formed.

The OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee was proposed by these members of OASIS:

JoAnn Hackos, Comtech JoAnn.Hackos@comtech-serv.com (Convenor/Chair)
Frank Miller, Comtech Frank.miller@comtech-serv.com
Michael Priestley, IBM mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
Debra Bissantz, LSI Logic debra.bissantz@lsi.com
Troy Klukewich, Oracle Troy.Klukewich@oracle.com
Bob Doyle, Associate bobdoyle@skybuilders.com
Gershon Joseph, Associate Gershon.joseph@tech-tav.com
Tony Self, Associate tself@hyperwrite.com
Kristen Eberlein, Individual keberlein@pobox.com
Rene Gedaly, Individual yourtechwriter@yahoo.com
Bryan Schnabel, Individual bryan.s.schnabel@tektronix.com
Chona Shumate, Individual Chona_Shumate@Cymer.com
Kay Whatley, Individual kay@brightpathsolutions.com

For more information, see the DITA Adoption TC Page

Eight Slides Explain DITA Topics, Maps, Specialization

Download a zipped folder with eight explanatory slides that you can use to educate your tech pubs group about DITA.

Feel free to use these in your own presentations on DITA. They combine ideas from some of the best slides in use over the past few years by DITA evangelists.

Or listen to the 5-minute Flash tutorial that uses animated versions of these slides to describe the core functionality of DITA.

Your D.Q. Helps Make the Business Case for DITA

The DITA Quotient estimates the value of DITA for your organization.

Simply answer ten yes/no questions about content management, structure, reuse, single-sourcing, localization, markup, conditional processing, modularity, task-orientation, minimalism, and standards.

You get a printable profile of your D.Q., which you can use as a checklist of questions about your structured content strategy and to compare yourself to industry averages.

DITA Consultants are using the D.Q., along with an estimate of the DITA Maturity Model level, to analyze a client's business case for DITA.

Get your DITA Quotient now (fill out an anonymous online form - no registration required).

DITA Tools from A to Z

DITA News has now posted the full copy of the STC Intercom special DITA issue cover story, with its extensive feature tables.

Here is the introduction to the story:

DITA's promise of topic-based structured authoring is not merely better documentation. lt is the creation of mission-critical information for your organization, written with a deep understanding of your most important audiences, that can be repurposed to multiple delivery channels and localized for multilingual global markets.

Download your copy here.

Read it in Dutch 

DITA Tools Survey

The first Annual Survey of DITA Tools was recently distributed to six DITA communities.

• the main community mailing list dita-users@yahoo.com (1900 subscribers),
• the official OASIS community at DITA.XML.org (1300 members),
• the DITA News/DITA Users community (900/750 members),
• the STC (13,000 members),
• the TECHWR-L mailing list (2500 subscribers),
• the Content Wrangler Community (a social network with 1600 members)

The survey asks for a profile of the user, and then collects usage statistics and critical comments on more than three dozen DITA-related tools.

Complete the DITA Tools Survey here.

DITA Users now offers three membership packages

Since April 2007, the DITA Users international membership organization has provided basic online DITA editing and a personal workspace folder to hundreds of tech writers around the world getting started with DITA.

DITA Users is NOT a social network (although you can locate other members easily with our private members directory)), it is a productivity tool. It is also not a production environment, it is a learning tool.

DITA Users has now reached 750 members in 36 countries and we are changing our membership options (How To Join.

We have eliminated the free membership program, because it is costly to maintain permanent workspace directories for so many people. We will still offer free access to the DITA Storm Editor in our demo sandbox folder. So new DITA Users can still try out our training tools. Our 5-minute Flash tutorial will remain free, as will access to our DITA Tools from A to Z Survey.

We hope that many of our current free members will join to keep their workspace folders and help support our many resource websites for DITA.

A $150 membership includes the leading book on DITA and a desktop DITA Editor to complement the web-based DITA Storm editor.

A full $100 membership includes the choice of the leading book on DITA or a desktop DITA Editor to complement the web-based DITA Storm editor.

The book (a $50 value) is JoAnn Hackos' Introduction to DITA - either the original edition by Kylene Bruski and Jennifer Linton or the new Arbortext Edition.

The desktop editor is the $48 Academic Edition of the <oXygen/> XML Editor, now at version 9 with full DITA support.

Desktop editors communicate with web servers via FTP or WebDAV (distributed authoring and versioning). DITA Users can now WebDAV-enable individual members' workspace folders.

Most DITA authoring tools offer WebDAV, some as a premium only available in their Enterprise Editions (for example, Syntext Serna and XMLmind).

DITA Users still offers a basic $50 membership without the book or desktop editor. Benefits include a WebDAV-enabled folder and discounts on major DITA conferences.

Paid memberships are renewable for $50/year. Free memberships include just one IBM DITA docset.

Anyone with a WebDAV-enabled DITA authoring tool can use it on their DITA Users document sets. These include two docsets from IBM and the docset from Comtech Services in the Introduction to DITA book. They can also create their own projects.

Practically speaking, anyone already invested in an advanced DITA authoring tool may be beyond the need for the "DITA from A to B" learning offered by DITA Users. But the new access method may make online training valuable for small tech pub groups who can now use their familiar tools (like Arbortext Editor or XMetaL Author) on the DITA Users website, as well as use innovative tools like the web-based DITA Storm, while their teams get started with DITA.

In any case, DITA Users member fees underwrite our network of DITA support websites, including this newsletter. So please consider joining today.

About DITA Newsletter

DITA Newsletter is published by DITA News, one of a network of websites in support of DITA. It is 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 with three starter DITA docsets, and a private member directory to locate other DITA Users.
ditausers.org

DITA Infocenter - the DITA architectural and language specifications, and the Open Toolkit User Guide, online 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

Please consider joining DITA Users today. Three membership packages are available, $150, $100, and $50

Your membership fee supports our network of websites, including this newsletter. Discounts on DITA conferences and workshops more than offset your annual membership fee

http://www.ditausers.org/membership/how_to_join/