![]() Thank you Tony for a useful update on the current state of affairs in DITA world. ![]() It’s good to have a tool that is as open as possible, so that it is extensible and interoperable.You need a tool that supports specialisation, so that you can add your own topic types.The tool should support the round trip, so that you can open DITA content, work on it and then save it as DITA.it should support the current DITA standard. The tool should be as compliant as possible i.e.Tony gave us some points to consider when choosing a DITA authoring tool: The DITA 1.2 standard has not yet been officially released. If you like, you can “constrain” them to make them more strict.Īlso pretty cool in DITA 1.2: The new “subjectScheme” ditamap element supports facets, a concept discussed in Matthew Ellison’s earlier session on search. When you upgrade to DITA 1.2, your task topics will automatically become “sloppy”. Some people say DITA is becoming more and more flexible (“sloppy”) and therefore less and less useful, in that you can now add new types of to the DITA “task” topic type. One of the bits I found interesting was that there’s been some criticism of DITA 1.2. Tony has a lot of information and I’m sure he’d be delighted to pass it on. In this part of the talk, Tony went into the new features of DITA 1.2. If you need context sensitivity, you can do that too with a bit of extra work.īut DITA is not quite ready for more sophisticated features such as popups and dropdowns. If you want professional-looking output, you can do that with some work on the CSS style sheets If you’re looking for tri-pane help output such as HTML, HTML Help and Eclipse Help, you can do that with the OT. Tony’s verdict: Is DITA ready for us to produce professional online help? One of the beauties of DITA is that the separation of content from representation makes it easier to support a multitude of output media. Tony pointed out that more and more user assistance is being delivered on “unusual” media such as phones, tablets, GPS displays, eBooks and augmented reality goggles. Increasing demand for different help formats Context-sensitive help (Eclipse Help and CHM i.e.There also plugins for the DITA Open Toolkit, dubbed OT plugins, that can produce: He was running an Eclipse standalone web server from his own machine.Ĭommercial tools can convert DITA to WebHelp, AIR Help, ePub (eBook format) and many others. Eclipse Help - Tony gave us a quick demo of an Eclipse Help help system.Flare 5 supports the import and export of DITA content.With RoboHelp 8, you can import DITA content.Note that it exports generic DITA content, not the full semantic markup. Author-it allows you to export your content into DITA format.WebWorks ePublisher supports DITA content.Some are good DITA publishing tools (in particular, Tony mentioned Flare an RoboHelp).None of the common authoring tools are DITA editors.These are some of the points Tony covered around DITA and HATs: Others are commercial and quite expensive. WinANT Echidna (Tony created this tool.).RoboHelp (As above, RoboHelp is not an authoring tool.).You can import your DITA content into Flare and then output it into another format such as HTML.) MadCap Flare (Flare is not an authoring tool.Leximation DITA-FMx (a FrameMaker plugin).The content is stored in exactly the same format.Īuthor-it is not on the list, because it can’t manage DITA content. The toolkit does not offer an authoring tool.Ī hint: Because DITA is a standard, you can use the authoring tools interchangeably. Interestingly, the DITA Open Toolkit is not on the list. So for example, you may use an authoring tool for DITA, a separate publishing tool for DITA, another tool for reviewing content, and so on. When working with DITA, you use a suite of tools rather than a single tool.This enforces the separation of content from form. DITA is an OASIS standard for a form of XML.Here are my key takeaways from this part of Tony’s session: Delivery options for content authored in DITA.DITA as used in various help-authoring tools (affectionately known as HATs).The usefulness of specialisation and constraints.An overview of DITA: authoring, content management, publishing tools and the DITA Open Toolkit.
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