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,…

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3 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.…

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How 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…

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How 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…

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How 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.…

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High Entry Threshold for New DITA Writers

High Entry Threshold for New DITA Writers is a rarely admitted issue for technical communicators. I receive reader letters about DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) these days that more or less ask the same question: how difficult is it for a technical writer to specialize in single-sourcing and structured authoring? Should they learn DITA? And…

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