Leaders in Content Creation and Delivery Enable Organizations across the Globe to Capitalize on Growing DITA Standard
XMetaL, the global leader in XML content creation and collaboration solutions, and Mekon Ltd, UK's leading DITA and XML content solutions consultancy organization today announced the release of an open source FrameMaker® Adapter for the DITA Open Toolkit. Mekon and XMetaL collaborated on the development of the FrameMaker Adapter, which plugs into the DITA Open Toolkit, to allow Adobe FrameMaker® to be used as a print rendering engine for DITA content created in XML editors.
The FrameMaker Adapter provides organizations that rely on FrameMaker for PDF output the ability to choose from a variety of authoring tools for creating DITA content, while preserving their investment in FrameMaker templates and style sheets. This allows them to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of the DITA Open Toolkit for processing DITA content, such as map merging and transformations into assorted output formats.
Moldflow Corporation, an XMetaL customer and the world's leading producer of CAE and optimization software for the injection-molding industry, contributed to the development of the FrameMaker Adapter and is using it along with XMetaL Author DITA Edition to publish product documentation. "The FrameMaker Adapter enabled an efficient transition from our legacy FrameMaker publishing system to a topic-oriented system based on DITA," said Tim Lake, director, Technology Transfer. "We've been able to preserve the appearance and quality of our printed documentation while making our publishing processes significantly more responsive to increasing customer and market needs." DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is an OASIS standard for information development that is rapidly being adopted as the preferred approach for producing technical and other structured documentation. The DITA Open Toolkit (OT) is an open source implementation of the DITA specification, and includes processing capabilities which can render DITA content to various output formats, including XSL-FO to PDF, HTML, and various forms of User Assistance. The FrameMaker Adapter, one of the first products to take advantage of the new plug-in architecture of the Open Toolkit, adds FrameMaker to this list of formats. According to Don Day, chair of the DITA Technical Committee, "This tool makes best use of the DITA OT processing architecture to process a DITA map into a FrameMaker stream that can be printed directly through the FrameMaker print engine, which is an excellent way to make use of the FrameMaker assets that a company may already have." The FrameMaker Adapter includes a FrameMaker XML Application that provides all the necessary components for importing and printing the content produced by the Adapter, including an Element Definition Document (EDD), read/write rules, and example styles and templates. Existing FrameMaker templates can be converted to use the XML Application by simply renaming styles to match the style names defined in the Application. The XML Application can also be extended using standard FrameMaker features while maintaining compatibility with the content produced by the Adapter. Comtech Services used the FrameMaker Adapter to publish their new book on DITA, "Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture". "The FrameMaker Adapter allowed us to self-publish the book, which is almost 300 pages, at low cost while meeting tight deadlines," said JoAnn Hackos, president of Comtech Services and a world renowned expert in information technologies. "The Adapter has certainly demonstrated its ability to handle large print publishing projects." Working with FrameMaker and XMetaL users around Europe, Mekon has the expertise and interest to contribute to the FrameMaker Adapter. "Many of our clients have invested in developing FrameMaker assets for years, both internally and through Mekon Services," said Julian Murfitt, managing director, Mekon UK Ltd. "We believe the Adapter will be a major contributor to the adoption of DITA while maximizing return on investment and maintaining solution scalability." "We have many customers that are switching from FrameMaker to XMetaL Author DITA Edition," said Bruce Sharpe, general manager of XMetaL. "Our tight integration with the DITA Open Toolkit allows customers to continue their use of FrameMaker to produce print output, while taking advantage of DITA technology." The FrameMaker Adapter can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132728 and is freely available under the same open-source license as the DITA Open Toolkit. About XMetaL, a Justsystems Company XMetaL® provides the world's leading XML content creation and collaboration solutions, advancing the goals of globally-focused, customer-driven organizations. XMetaL's family of software and services enables your company to create, share, reuse, and deliver content more quickly and cost-effectively, across all customer channels, from sales, marketing, and customer service, to training and technical support. Visit xmetal.com to learn how leading brands such as Cisco, Daimler Chrysler, HP, Kodak, Microsoft, Philips, RIM, Southwest Airlines, Sybase, Symantec, Texas Instruments and USA Today use XMetaL to bring products and services to market faster, with greater accuracy, and at lower cost. About Mekon Mekon are the UKs leading independent XML publishing systems integration experts. Mekon have over 15 years experience in helping organizations reuse content via single-source publishing solutions, work with the leading XML/SGML authoring tools, and are contributors to the IBM derived DITA standard. Mekon have designed Notus as an extremely easy to use content management system which is easy to adopt, scalable, and optimised for DITA and content reuse scenarios.
Contact:
