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In this webcast, Sarah O'Keefe discusses the challenges of getting attractive output from DITA and demonstrates Scriptorium's approach to web-based help and PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit does not provide web-based help out of the box, so we extended the Open Toolkit to create it. For PDF, we have built a set of stylesheets that address the most common problems faced with DITA-based PDF publishing—enabling an index via FOP, page numbering, headers and footers, and the like. If your organization is planning to publish DITA content, this session is for you. We briefly discuss various options for creating output from DITA, and then show you SPSHelp (our web-based help) and Scriptorium's PDF framework.
Citation preview
Attractive DITAIt is possible!
Sarah O’KeefeScriptorium Publishing
background imageflickr: thelastminute
Housekeeping notes
❖ Everyone is muted except for the presenter
❖ Please ask your questions through the Questions area in the webcast interface
❖ The presentation is being recorded; attendees do not appear in the recording
Sarah O’Keefe @sarahokeefe❖ Founder and president, Scriptorium
Publishing
❖ Content strategy fortech comm
❖ Interested in collision ofcontent, publishing, andtechnology
Poll: How are you producing (or planning to produce) output from DITA?
Warning:Product overview ahead
flickr: navin75
The brain trustSimon Bate and David Kelly
DITA output options
❖ Lower your standards?
❖ DITA Open Toolkit
❖ Custom development
❖ Scriptorium plug-ins
❖ Other plug-ins (DITA4Publishers)
❖ Alternatives to the Open Toolkit
Obstacles appear insurmountable…
flickr: SurprisePally
DITA OT challenges
❖ Technology load and learning curve
❖ Ant, CSS, XSLT, HTML, XSL-FO
❖ Default plug-ins are not suitable for production
❖ No support for web-based help
❖ PDF very difficult to configure
Choose your tools wisely.
flickr: iwona_kellie
Poll: What is the biggest obstacle to attractive DITA output?
Lower your standards.
❖ Does your audience care about typographic niceties?
❖ Less sophisticated formatting = lower implementation cost and greater automation
❖ Especially helpful for PDF!
DITA Open Toolkit
❖ Provides output for HTML, RTF, PDF, HTML Help, Eclipse Help, and more
❖ Extensible
❖ Challenging to configure
❖ Build automation and build integration
❖ Open source
Custom development
❖ Expensive
❖ Time-consuming
❖ Worthwhile for complex and nonnegotiable requirements?
❖ Expert consultants are available (ahem)
Scriptorium plug-ins
❖ Plug-ins run in Open Toolkit
❖ Collection of XSLT, XSL-FO, CSS, graphics
❖ Can customize further
❖ Provides web-based help and more reasonable PDF
DITA4Publishers
❖ ePub and Kindle output
❖ Word to DITA
❖ DITA to InDesign
❖ http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net/
PDF publishing is hard
❖ Printed page layouts have more options than HTML layouts.
❖ Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) needs to support sophisticated page layout options.
❖ Pushing XML into page layout tools is challenging.
❖ Automation means giving up page-by-page formatting.
Alternatives to the DITA Open Toolkit for PDF❖ Page-based layout tools
❖ Help authoring/conversion tools
❖ High-end processors
Page-based layout tools
❖ Provide excellent PDF output
❖ Formatting templates easier than DITA OT configuration
❖ Issues with XML white space
❖ Round-tripping is challenging (FrameMaker) or nearly impossible (others)
Help authoring/conversion tools❖ Many provide web-based help solutions
❖ Easier configuration than DITA OT
Scriptorium PDF
❖ Based on DITA Open Toolkit pdf2 transform
❖ A standard Open Toolkit plug-in
❖ Addresses some of the most common concerns with PDF
Configuration items (partial list)❖ Page size and margins
❖ Font controls
❖ Header and footer
❖ Table of contents formatting
❖ Index generation (even in FOP)
❖ Index formatting
Default PDF output
Scriptorium PDF output
Easier configuration
❖ Added variables (and comments) to basic-settings.xsl for many common requirements <!-- Scriptorium added controls for whether the current system date and time appear in the footers. Any value but yes for these variables will prevent the date or time from appearing in the footers. --> <xsl:variable name="date-in-footers">yes</xsl:variable> <xsl:variable name="time-in-footers">no</xsl:variable>
Web-based help
❖ Not provided in DITA OT
❖ Can use help authoring tools
❖ XMetaL and Trisoft include web-based help output
Scriptorium Help
❖ Web-based help
❖ Provides tripane browser-based help that is not available in Open Toolkit
Pricing̶Scriptorium PDF
❖ $10,000
❖ Plug-in files
❖ Your customizations (fonts, logo, headers and footers, page size, and more)
Pricing̶Scriptorium Help
❖ $4,000
❖ Plug-in files
❖ Your customizations (CSS, logo, headers and footers, and more)
Improving access to high-quality output
flickr: blipsman
Factors to consider in evaluating output options❖ Platform requirements
❖ Technical resources
❖ Typography requirements
❖ Velocity
❖ Volume
❖ Versioning
Perseveranceflickr: bootbearwdc
Structured authoring survey❖ Researching adoption rates, issues, tools
❖ Open until March 1
❖ Participants get free results
❖ http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/structure
❖ Please participate, and tell your friends!
Coming attractions
❖ Tony Self on The DITA Style Guide, March 9
❖ March: Trends in technical communication, 2011
❖ April: Structured authoring survey results
More information
❖ PDF plug-in: scriptorium.com/2011/01/a-makeover-for-the-dita-ots-pdf-plugin/
❖ Contact us at [email protected]
Questions? Comments?
Contact information
❖ Sarah O’Keefe
❖ www.scriptorium.com
❖ @sarahokeefe
