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. [...]

The first rule of XML Club is “You don’t talk about the XML.”

In a recent webinar with Ann Rockley and Brett Freeman, Scott Abel said “Don’t talk about the XML. It scares people away.” Hence, my reference to the movie Fight Club. At the Intelligent Content Conference 2011, the industry thought leaders are coming together to brainstorm about how to make content more usable, make XML not scary. Come [...]

Upcoming Event: Intelligent Content 2011

Quark is proud to be a sponsor of the Intelligent Content Conference 2011, presented by The Rockley Group. You are invited to attend the “Measuring the ROI in DITA” pre-conference workshop. Bring your content, laptop, and Excel. See you there!

ROI: DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers, Second Edition, Released

As a contributing author, I am proud to announce, with The Rockley Group, the release of the second edition of DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers. The second edition has been revised and updated. Two new chapters were added: “Calculating ROI for your DITA project” and “What’s new in DITA 1.2.” “Calculating ROI [...]

My Content: When, Where, and How I Want It

 I have a client that wants to be able to publish instructions onto human skin. The OASIS standards committee really liked the idea of developing a tattoo plug-in for the publishing engine and said they’d have it ready in the next release. Ok, not really. This is my daughter’s arm during a swim meet and [...]

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