5 Reasons Not to Convert to Structured Authoring

By Ugur Akinci

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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How to Write Goal-Focused and Structured Technical Documents

By Ugur Akinci

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…

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3 Disadvantages of Writing Documents with DITA and Structured Authoring

By Ugur Akinci

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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Well Formed versus Valid XML Documents

By Ugur Akinci

“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…

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How to Create a DITA Topic Object in FrameMaker

By Ugur Akinci

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)

By Ugur Akinci

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

By Ugur Akinci

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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Adobe InDesign for Publishing Technical Documents on iPhone and iPad

By Ugur Akinci

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…

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