One of the great things about YouTube (other than numerous videos of cats) is that if you are looking to learn more about a subject—like DITA XML—there’s plenty of material available for you. George Bina at SyncRO Soft recently sent me a link to several DITA and oXygen-related videos posted online, and I realized thatRead More
Tag: XMetaL
DITA Takes Flight: Some Evidence of DITA Maturity
As mentioned in the previous article there is steady growth in the job market for technical writers with DITA experience. What’s interesting is that there are further signs that DITA usage within firms is maturing, indicating that DITA is now out of the “early adoption” phase. The last time I did a DITA jobs surveyRead More
List of DITA-related Videos
The following is a (hopefully) comprehensive list of all DITA XML-related videos being hosted on YouTube and Vimeo. As you can see there’s plenty of videos on all sorts of DITA-related topics out there, ranging from how to use DITA in various editors (including FrameMaker, oXygen and XMetaL), tutorials on DITA, a few DITA-based CMSesRead More
Specializing Conref Target Topics to Avoid Spaghetti Code
While doing some DITA training recently for a client I ran across an idea that struck me as being a good way to avoid spaghetti code. In retrospect, it’s one of those obvious “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas: a specialized topic just for holding conref-able text. But first, I ought to explain whyRead 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 Online Forums
Here is a listing of online forums I have been able to track down about DITA: DITA Users Group on Yahoo: A very active group which has been around since mid-2004. Good both for the beginner as well as experienced writers, and is monitored by several very senior people in the DITA community, including manyRead More