Publication Standards Part 2: The Fragmented Present
Nick Disabato continues his exploration of the need for content standards — and big changes — in the publishing industry. Actually, Nick’s advice and guidance isn’t limited to the publishing industry, but rather, his suggestions are relevant to all organizations that publish and deliver information to those who need it, when and where they need [...]
Migrating to DITA: How Automated Conversion Works and Why it Matters to You
by Patrick Baker, VP Development and Professional Services, Stilo International An unavoidable part of moving to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), or any other structured authoring system, is converting your existing content into the new format. Most organizations that make the move to structured writing have to make the change while still continuing to [...]
Cleaning Up eBook Conversion Messes: Tips For Success
By Mark Gross, with Devorah Bloom, DCL In my previous column, Understanding Content Conversion: Unfortunately, There’s No ‘Easy’ Button, I examined the various areas that trip up the eBook conversion process –special characters, tables, hyphenations, and so on. This column follows on that theme, based on a question from a consultant with a major consulting firm: [...]
What is XML Really About?
by Mark Baker We all know that XML is a good thing. The pundits and the vendors all tell us so. XML opens up many possibilities for content. But exactly how (and why) it does so is not always made clear. Getting your content into XML is not, by itself, enough to deliver any or [...]
Publishing Dynamic Product Catalogs
As a technical information-development professional looking for opportunities to expand dynamic publishing to the enterprise, don’t overlook product sales catalogs. Product sales catalogs provide a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of single-sourcing content, integrating with purchasing databases, and automating the publishing process. Enabling sales personnel to assemble catalog copy to meet their immediate needs [...]
Understanding Content Conversion: Unfortunately, There’s No ‘Easy’ Button
By Mark Gross, President, CEO, Data Conversion Laboratory Data Conversion Laboratory, the company I founded, has been doing document conversion for thirty years and every once in a while I still get asked from someone I haven’t seen in a while “are you still doing that?” or “isn’t there software that does all that?” The [...]
Moving From A Proprietary XML Environment To DITA
By JoAnn T. Hackos, President, Comtech Services, Inc. and Director, The Center for Information-Development Management The information-development world embraced desktop publishing in the mid-1980s with great enthusiasm. Desktop publishing software and laser printers gave us the ability to make documents more readable and easier to navigate. We were able to bypass the costs of typesetting [...]
The DITA Community Celebrates
The value of being in a community can sneak up on you. When my nine-year-old son expressed interested in karate, I quickly enrolled him. I hoped for Logan to gain coordination, muscle and discipline. What he gained, what my entire family gained, surprised me. We’ve formed long lasting friendships with other students and parents. We’ve [...]
Interview with Richard Brandt, Chairperson, RIXML.org Emerging Technology Committee
By Jack Roehrig, Executive Director, RIXML.org Richard Brandt has been leading the Emerging Technology Committee since February 2011. Recently I spoke with Richard about how he came to RIXML.org and why Quark – best known for its desktop publishing software, QuarkXPress – is leading technology discussions in the financial services industry. Jack: Some people may [...]
A DITA 101 Conkeyref Example
The keys feature in DITA is probably one of the most powerful and talked about features. Let’s take a look at one of the more popular use cases of this feature. The Related Topic links that are created for a topic are based on that topics relationship to other topics as specified in a map. [...]
