XMetaL Author DITA Edition

Product: Submitted by jsilver on Thu, 2006-03-16 01:28. Last updated on Fri, 2007-12-07 03:58.

XMetaL Author DITA Edition is the industry's first solution built exclusively for authoring DITA content. It combines all the powerful and productive features of XMetaL Author with new DITA-specific capabilities, including visual map editing, intuitive editing behaviors for DITA elements, drag-and-drop content references, and out-of-the-box integration with the DITA Open Toolkit for single-source publishing. (integration with content management systems; integration with DITA Open Toolkit; comprehensive DITA support.)

URL: 

http://na.justsystems.com/content.php?page=xmetal-author

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XMetaL Doesn't Use DITA To Create Their Own Documentation

thecontentwrangler | Fri, 2006-07-14 11:57
I recently attended Jerry Silver's presentation about DITA at X-Pubs London. He gave the audience many reasons you might use DITA -- translation savings, increased content quality, productivity increases through content reuse, and more. When the question and answer period came around, I asked Jerry if XMetaL uses DITA to create its own online help and software documentation. The answer, a shocking "Not yet."

So, while XMetaL's team may be intimately involved with helping to steer the DITA standard in the right direction, it's not yet mastered the art of practicing what it preaches. Before you decide to use any tool with DITA, XMetaL or otherwise, make sure the vendor practices what they preach. If they can't be bothered to use DITA themselves,  you should shop around for a vendor that will show you their documentation and online help so you can look under the covers and see the DITA content they have created for yourself.

Scott Abel
Content Management Strategist
The Content Wrangler
abelsp@netdirect.net
www.thecontentwrangler.com

An Update on XMetaL's Own Documentation

jsilver | Fri, 2007-12-07 20:15

XMetaL Author DITA Edition was the first commercial editor that fully supported the DITA spec. As Scott points out, the documentation for that first release wasn't written in DITA. That would have been a nice trick, but in order to "eat our own dog food" we would have had to delay the release while the documentation was written, since the release had to be finished before it could be used for that purpose. It was more important that we get the release out to our customers. I'm sure that most of you in technical communication can empathize with this situation.

Of course we've always used XMetaL and XML to create our own documentation, and it was a relatively simple step to convert the documentation to DITA, for the subsequent release of the product.

By the way Scott, the link to the Angie Hirata interview in your followup post is broken. The correct link is http://www.thecontentwrangler.com/people/angie_hirata_interview_xmetal_t....

Update: XMetaL Does Use DITA To Create Their Own Documentation

thecontentwrangler | Thu, 2007-01-11 19:17
Hey, it may have taken them a little while to get it together, but the folks at XMetaL have created some documentation using DITA. Read all about it in my interview with Angie Hirata of Just Systems.

Scott Abel
Content Management Strategist
The Content Wrangler
abelsp@netdirect.net
www.thecontentwrangler.com
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