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.

Is oXygen your favorite tool for authoring your content today?

by Don Day, Erik Hennum, John Hunt, Michael Priestley, David Schell, Nancy Harrison

The short description is an optional element in DITA, but it has powerful usability implications. Carefully-written short descriptions can help readers more successfully navigate information and locate topics that answer their questions. In addition, the act of crafting careful short descriptions can help writers clarify their understanding of the technical content. This session will cover how the content of the <shortdesc> element is displayed in various forms of output, such as PDF, Eclipse-based help, and Microsoft HTML Help.

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).

Guideline and script for the DITA Open Toolkit open-source publishing system to manage multilingual DITA XML projects.

This case study outlines an approach at BMC Software with a pilot project where we modeled both an error messages manual and an installation and configuration manual. A great read, and now the article is available with an optional registration with the Rockley Report.

Case Study: Using DITA to Develop a New Information Architecture at BMC Software

Presentation at the 28 May 2008 meeting of the RTP DITA Users' Group by Shane Taylor, Computer Task Group. Originally presented at DITA 2006 by Shane Taylor and Karen Mobley (IBM).

Building DITA Content With the DITA Open Toolkit. Presented at the DITA 2007 conference by Guanjun Cai of IBM.

This paper describes how DITA-based documentation was implemented at CEDROM-SNi, one of Canada's leading on-line news content aggregators. The project delivers documentation as diverse as user training materials and Web Services reference guides targeted to programmers. We focus on the benefits, how tos, and lessons learned.