There are many key factors that make DITA-based technical documentation complementary to Agile-based product development. Here are 10 reasons, among many, why DITA and Agile make a great partnership: Topic-based approach in DITA assists with incremental development: One of the tenets of DITA is content reuse, encouraging technical writers to “write once, use many”. ThisRead More
Tag: DITA Open Toolkit
Five Highlights from DITA tcworld 2016
One of the final technical communications conferences in the fall is the biggest: tcworld which draws in over 4,000 attendees, mostly from Germany and across Europe. I came to the conference with some trepidation given that, last year, DITA experts and vendors attending the show got a largely frosty reception, with German CCMS vendors bonding togetherRead More
Highlights from DITA North America 2016
[This article was original published in two parts on the IXIASOFT website back in April 2016. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2. This version on DITAWriter adds some minor updates and brings the two pieces together as a single article. I have also back-dated this blog closer to the time of the conference, purely forRead More
Which Tech Writing Tools Are the Most Used?
Analyzing the Results from the WritersUA 2014 User Assistance Tool Survey This past Saturday WritersUA came out with its 2014 User Assistance Tool Survey, based on a wide-ranging poll of those working in the technical writing field. If you look at the WritersUA page it simply displays the raw poll results without any analysis. ItRead More
The Latest Trends in DITA XML Use in Tech Writing (Part 2)
In the previous article I looked briefly at the numbers from the latest Microsft’s Visio survey of technical writer tools, taking the raw data and showing where the DITA-OT appears in the list of the overall top 20 Technical Writer’s tools (#18, up from #20 in 2011) and where it appears in a listing ofRead More
The Latest Trends in DITA XML Use in Tech Writing (Part 1)
Update January 27, 2012: Have changed the table info so that it is driven from a database – now you can sort and search the content of the tables, as well as seeing the full listing of tools in the survey. It wasn’t that long ago when I looked at the 2011 Survey that WritersUARead More
Where Does DITA XML Fit When it Comes to Tech Writing Tool Use?
Update January 27, 2012: Have changed the table info so that it is driven from a database — now you can sort and search the content of the tables, as well as seeing the full listing of tools in the survey. The folks at self-selection bias are running their annual survey of the type ofRead More
DITA 101 Presentation on YouTube
A nice four-part presentation (PowerPoint slide deck plus running commentary) on the basics of DITA by Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium. The whole thing runs about 40 minutes total and is good intro to the topic. One of the things I particularly like comes up in the second part where O’Keefe focuses on DITA’s niche inRead More