Feature articles by DITAWriter or by other contributors.
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
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
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
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
One of the most interesting presentations I saw at the Ixiasoft DITA CMS conference back in June was presented by a Documentation Team Lead at Research in Motion (RIM). While these days the beleaguered firm is better known in the news for its revenue woes (though it is good to see some wins as well),Read More
The Webinar presentation I did yesterday afternoon on behalf of Data Conversion Laboratory has now been posted to YouTube. You can now watch this anytime. Enjoy! For those who just want the slide deck, here’s a copy of the PDF, and here’s a link to the original Prezi that it was derived from. Will beRead More
Currently I am working on updating the stats and images for my upcoming BatchGeo later this week, using the updated info from the Companies Using DITA listing. One of the things I wasn’t happy with was showing the worldwide and regional distribution of where the firms/organizations using DITA are located. I had been usingRead More
I just finished doing an overdue update to the popular “Companies Using DITA” listing, which now surpasses 300 firms and organizations, ranging from Abbott Laboratories to ZTE. This is likely still just the tip of the iceberg, as it is evident to me as I continue my research that there are many other companies andRead More
There’s just a few days to go before the big Content Management Strategies/DITA North America Conference in La Jolla, California. Am looking forward to presenting the keynote talk there, and to meet with other people in the industry and learn about the latest developments in DITA and technical documentation practice in general. I have learnedRead More
I liked a recent post on technical communications metrics on the the Mark Lewis blog recently, and while I don’t agree with the conclusion (any metric based on word counts and a subjective evaluation of quality is problematic IMHO) it did get me thinking about the topic of documentation metrics in general. I have doneRead More
