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The OASIS DITA TC has formed a Machine Industry Subcommittee to promote best practices and develop a design for structured, intent-based authoring of content for the machine industry. The subcommittee will develop a top-level plan for topics and domains, DITA DTDs and schemas. It will validate designs against sample content and embed sample documents to… Read more »

Writing sales, marketing and advertising related text, or “copywriting”, is a foreign field to a lot of people. You need to write something that catches someone’s attention and convince to do something. Taken from our e-learning course on copywriting, Dr Alan Rae has written a short article that introduces the basics of copywriting, helping you… Read more »

What’s the future for technical documentation and technical writing? This is one of two themes I’ll be talking about at the ISTC conference next month. Most of the discussions in the technical writing community focus on the process, focusing on Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA XML) and ways of writing online Help. There is less… Read more »

I caught part of Radio 4’s “Word of Mouth” programme last night, where they were discussing the difficulties in understanding mobile phone user manuals. An expert was explaining what the jargon meant (the expert makes a living by helping people to work out how to understand the latest technology). You can listen to the programme… Read more »

Adobe has released beta packs for DITA that extend the XML capabilities of FrameMaker 7.2 by adding support for core features of DITA. It consists of a set of plug-ins combined with a set of structure applications, which together provide core tools for DITA authoring and publishing.