DITA – Slaying sacred cows or burying problems?

There have been a number of posts recently on whether some commonly accepted best practises in technical writing are actually needed these days. This has come about as people question how they can develop the DITA standard to handle things like lead-in sentences and stem sentences. These don’t fit into the standard, and a number… Read more »

New updated DITA ecourse released (finally)

Tomorrow (or possibly tonight) we’ll be releasing the updated version of our popular ecourse “An Introduction to DITA“. Updated to reflect the changes in the DITA standard Updated to reflect the changes in the DITA Open Toolkit from version 1.3 to 1.4.2.1 Updated to reflect the changes in the downloading processes for installing the various… Read more »

Our DITA XML training course – Update

Carol is in the studio today, recording the audio track for the new, updated, version of our self-teach online course on DITA XML. She has to record 140(!) audio segments, which will take some time to complete. The development team will then match (within Abobe Captivate) these segments with the visuals and slides, ready, I… Read more »

XMetal Author 5.1 due out soon

News from JustSystems: – A preview of XMetaL Author 5.1: * Support for DITA 1.1 Authoring * Enhanced Publishing Integration with the latest versions of the DITA Open Toolkit and RenderX XEP FO engine.Enhanced PDF output for bookmap publishing.Extended configuration options for PDF publishing, providing better control over output without XSL-FO programming. * Improved Transclusion… Read more »

XML internationalization

The W3C has issued a working draft on best practices for XML internationalization. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#contents.