Structured Authoring
5 Reasons Not to Convert to Structured Authoring
Introduction XML-based structured authoring has been one of the hottest topics in the technical writing community for quite a while. Shifting from traditional documentation to “structured documentation” has been the “holy grail” of top-echelon technical communicators for the good part of the last decade. In one survey reported by Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler,…
Read MoreHow to Write Goal-Focused and Structured Technical Documents
PREMISE Most of the technical documentation that exists in the world today is feature-focused. It is also unstructured: there is no well-defined hierarchy between the components of the document. For example, there is no enforcement of a hierarchical rule like “every task description shall be followed by a reference section.” See this related article. PROBLEM…
Read More3 Disadvantages of Writing Documents with DITA and Structured Authoring
It’s no secret that DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) and structured authoring represent the way large organizations will handle their legacy documents in the future for various reasons. Ease of updating and freedom in selecting publication platforms are two of the reasons that come to mind. Lower production costs is another, in the long run.…
Read MoreHow to Create a Structured FrameMaker Document from an Unstructured FM Document by using a Conversion Table
The future belongs to structured authoring but what to do with all that unstructured legacy FrameMaker files sitting on our hard-drives? The obvious answer is of course start to convert them into structured FM documents. If you have Adobe FrameMaker it’s not that hard a process either. Here is a simple way to convert unstructured…
Read MoreWell Formed versus Valid XML Documents
“Well formed” (or “Well-formed”) and “Valid” are two very important concepts in structured XML authoring. Well Formed Well formed means, the XML tags used in the structured document follow a set of XML rules. Two of the more important rules are 1) tags should be paired with opening and closing tags, and, 2) tag pairs…
Read MoreHow to Create a DITA Topic Object in FrameMaker
Welcome to my tutorial on How to Create a DITA Topic Object in FrameMaker FrameMaker (FM) has a very powerful and built-in DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) engine under its hood. Also known as “structured authoring,” this functionality comes with the FrameMaker as a default feature. When you buy FrameMaker, you do not need to…
Read MoreHow to Create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker (Part 2)
Continuing with our tutorial about How to Create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker. PREREQUISITE: Make sure your FrameMaker is set for structured authoring. Select File > Preferences > General and select Structure FrameMaker from the Product Interface drop-down list. NOTE: This tutorial is the second part of this tutorial. If you haven’t so far, please read this tutorial post first. Let’s…
Read MoreHow to Create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker
How to create a DITA Concept Object in FrameMaker is not an easy task. PREREQUISITE: Make sure your FrameMaker is set for structured authoring. Select File > Preferences > General and select Structure FrameMaker from the Product Interface drop-down list. (1) Select DITA > New DITA File > New <concept> … from the menu bar.…
Read MoreAdobe InDesign for Publishing Technical Documents on iPhone and iPad
I’ve been studying structured-authoring and DITA for some time with an eye towards publishing technical documents on mobile platforms like iPad and iPhone. I always thought that was the natural way to re-purpose and adapt my FrameMaker documents for the digital media. Recently, however, I became aware of another possibility as I started to study…
Read MoreAdvantages of Content Management System (CMS) in Technical Writing
I believe not too far into the future a great majority of technical documents will be produced through Content Management System (CMS) platforms. Reduced to its simplest terms, a CMS is a text editor ran by a relational and searchable database. Content Management Systems are not cheap and they have a learning curve. That’s why…
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