The Tools of the Trade
As mentioned previously, I have been in my current position as an Information Developer for just over a year now and, during that time, I have moved from working in Framemaker and MS Word to the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of publishing tools, including Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. Over the past few months, I have slowly been moving into a DITA-based Content Component Management System (CCMS) environment, developed by Ixiasoft. Thanks to my initial grounding in XML from an assignment last year, I have found the transition relatively straightforward.
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is a topic-based authoring tool that was developed by IBM in the 1960s and refined in the early 2000s. It is an open-source authoring tool and is now one of the main industry standards for producing technical documentation. Its main advantage is the reuse of content that can be published on a number of different output platforms e.g. printable PDFs, HTML webpages etc. and is ideal for use in a CCMS.
Each separate section of a document is created as a topic - either a concept, a task, or a reference. Each topic is created once but can be re-used across multiple documents if necessary. Therefore, DITA facilitates the consistent organization of information across documents. In addition, if updates are made to a topic in one document, these changes will automatically propagate to all documents in which the topic is used. This saves a lot of time and effort when it comes to editing multiple documents.
An invaluable resource in coming to grips with the basics of DITA is the free online training website Learning DITA. You can progress through this website at your own pace, as each unit is standalone so you can absorb as much or as little as you want, when you want. This is an ideal way to learn DITA and I have used it extensively whilst simultaneously creating, and editing, documents in the Oxygen XML editor. One feature of Oxygen that is particularly useful is that it will only allow you to insert the tags and/or elements that are valid for a particular topic so you soon become accustomed to what is - or isn't - allowed.
Also, if you initially create the wrong type of topic e.g. a concept instead of a task, it is straightforward to refactor the content to the correct topic. Oxygen will automatically convert the XML to the correct structure so that only minor editing is required. You can choose to write in Author view (regular text with tag elements enabled or disabled) or Text view (XML mode). In general, I tend to write in Author mode, and edit in Text mode as I find it easier to edit the XML in that view.
Given all the various authoring tools that I have been using extensively for the past six months or so, I was bemused to discover that our current digital artefact assignment required the use of yet another authoring tool - Madcap Flare. While some of my work colleagues are familiar with it, I have not used it before. Therefore, I'm looking forward to becoming familiar with another structured authoring tool even if the name does sound like some type of exotic toadstool.
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is a topic-based authoring tool that was developed by IBM in the 1960s and refined in the early 2000s. It is an open-source authoring tool and is now one of the main industry standards for producing technical documentation. Its main advantage is the reuse of content that can be published on a number of different output platforms e.g. printable PDFs, HTML webpages etc. and is ideal for use in a CCMS.
Each separate section of a document is created as a topic - either a concept, a task, or a reference. Each topic is created once but can be re-used across multiple documents if necessary. Therefore, DITA facilitates the consistent organization of information across documents. In addition, if updates are made to a topic in one document, these changes will automatically propagate to all documents in which the topic is used. This saves a lot of time and effort when it comes to editing multiple documents.
Also, if you initially create the wrong type of topic e.g. a concept instead of a task, it is straightforward to refactor the content to the correct topic. Oxygen will automatically convert the XML to the correct structure so that only minor editing is required. You can choose to write in Author view (regular text with tag elements enabled or disabled) or Text view (XML mode). In general, I tend to write in Author mode, and edit in Text mode as I find it easier to edit the XML in that view.
Given all the various authoring tools that I have been using extensively for the past six months or so, I was bemused to discover that our current digital artefact assignment required the use of yet another authoring tool - Madcap Flare. While some of my work colleagues are familiar with it, I have not used it before. Therefore, I'm looking forward to becoming familiar with another structured authoring tool even if the name does sound like some type of exotic toadstool.
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"Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right." ~ Amy Joy
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