The folks at DITAToo have released another teaser on the results they are getting for a survey they are running that asks how people are converting legacy content to DITA. This shows the answers to two questions: what is the percentage of organizations that are re-writing or re-structuring their content in order to make itRead More
Category: Articles
Feature articles by DITAWriter or by other contributors.
DITA and the Return of the Editor
I have not had a lot of spare time of late as I have been working on several projects (which is always a good thing!) so I have not had the chance to write anything new for the site for a couple of weeks. So here is a piece I wrote earlier in the yearRead More
Thinking and Writing in DITA: Converting Legacy Content to DITA, Part 4
This is a the fourth in a series of pieces devoted to “Thinking in DITA” aimed at providing technical writers just starting out with DITA the thought processes behind writing technical documents in DITA. Whereas most DITA tutorials focus on the mechanics of writing – such as DITA’s tag set – this series examines whatRead More
Interesting Preliminary Results in Legacy-Content-to-DITA Survey
The folks at DITAToo have been running a survey asking people how they convert their legacy content over to DITA. The preliminary results are interesting if not terribly surprising: the vast majority of users are converting their content over from Unstructured FrameMaker, and after that, from Word: From the structure of the survey questions itRead More
SDL Updates their Suite of DITA-related Tools
Early last week, in fact during their one-day DITA Fest conference, SDL announced a “new family of software products” under the banner of “SDL LiveContent”. Well, maybe not entirely new, and it was quickly evident either to anyone who has already been using their tools or has been watching the industry for a while thatRead More
Thinking and Writing in DITA: Converting Legacy Content to DITA, Part 3
This is a the third in a series of pieces devoted to “Thinking in DITA” aimed at providing technical writers just starting out with DITA the thought processes behind writing technical documents in DITA. Whereas most DITA tutorials focus on the mechanics of writing—such as DITA’s tag set—this series examines what goes into writing andRead More
Thinking and Writing in DITA: Converting Legacy Content to DITA, Part 2
This is the second in a series of pieces devoted to “Thinking in DITA” aimed at providing technical writers just starting out with DITA the thought processes behind writing technical documents in DITA. Whereas most DITA tutorials focus on the mechanics of writing—such as DITA’s tag set—this series examines what goes into writing and thinkingRead More
Thinking and Writing in DITA: Converting Legacy Content to DITA, Part 1
This is the first in a series of pieces devoted to “Thinking in DITA” aimed at providing technical writers just starting out with DITA the thought processes behind writing technical documents in DITA. Whereas most DITA tutorials focus on the mechanics of writing—such as DITA’s tag set—this series examines what goes into writing and thinkingRead More
Choosing a DITA CMS
One of the projects I have been working on for a while is a list of CMSes that claim in some way to be DITA-capable, done largely because no such list seems to exist elsewhere. One of the things I have discovered in the process of surveying various CMS marketing materials is that it isRead More
What Size Should a DITA Topic Be?
When I was first investigating how DITA XML was being used by others at conferences in the mid-2000s, one of the questions that always came up at the end of a session was: “how big should a DITA topic be?” Even at the time I thought that this was kind of a silly question, sinceRead More