DITA for Lone Writers

This 3-day intensive course is intended for those technical writers who handle a quantity of documentation that contain a lot of repetitive or similar content and want to use DITA for more effective content reuse, content customization, and multi-channel publishing, but still don't know how to go about accomplishing this. 

Attend this course and you will learn:

  • How DITA is different and how to write for DITA
  • How much money your company can save with DITA
  • How to organize your content for better reuse
  • How to implement single-sourcing techniques with DITA
  • What tools you need to author and publish DITA
  • How to produce high quality PDF deliverables
  • How to make deliverables created with DITA conform to your company's style guide
  • How to customize DITA to your needs
  • How to make migration of legacy content to DITA as painless as possible

Day 1. Getting Started with DITA

Session I. Introducing DITA

  • Why DITA: understanding business challenges of traditional approaches to creating technical documentation
  • How DITA is different: understanding DITA essentials
  • DITA and structured writing
  • How DITA can help documentation teams to become more productive:  building a business case for DITA, calculating return-on-investment
  • Understanding DITA tools

 Session II. Authoring in DITA

  • Understanding the XML editor user interface
  • Creating DITA topics and learning Concept, Task, and Reference elements
  • Arranging topics into DITA maps
  • Working with DITA templates
  • Implementing Top-Down and Bottom-Up approaches with DITA

 Session III. Publishing

  • Installing DITA OT
  • Understanding DITA OT components
  • Producing various output formats (PDF, HTML, CHM, etc.) using DITA OT

Day 2. Implementing Single-Sourcing and Other Advanced Techniques in DITA

Session I. Writing for DITA

  • Understanding how writing for DITA is different
  • Planning technical documentation with the structured writing principles in mind
  • Making a topic minimum information unit: understanding what it really means
  • Making content context-independent and reusable
  • Do's and don't's

Session II. Single Sourcing with DITA

  • Single-source techniques overview
  • Conditionalizing content in a topic
  • Reusing a topic across multiple DITA maps
  • Reusing DITA maps
  • Filtering conditional content and producing deliverables for different customers

Session III. Linking in DITA

  • Linking methods
  • Using variables in DITA
  • Using cross-references in DITA and handling cross-references between topics

Day 3. Customizing DITA and DITA Output

Session I. Specializing DITA

  • DITA specialization overview
  • When to specialize
  • Specialization rules
  • Types of specialization: structural, domain, attributes
  • How to specialize: planning, specializing design, implementation

Session II. Publishing PDF

  • Understanding PDF output
  • Customizing the PDF output using XSL-FO
  • Publishing high quality PDF using Adobe FrameMaker and the DITA-FMx plugin
  • Supporting DITA specialization

Session III. Publishing HTML and HTML Help

  • Understanding HTML and HTML Help output
  • Customizing the output using XSLT and CSS
  • Supporting DITA specialization

Session IV. Converting Legacy Content to DITA

  • Understanding the conversion process
  • How to make the conversion process painless
  • Migrating from MS Word and Adobe FrameMaker to DITA

 

About the Instructor

Alex Masycheff is a content management professional with over 10 years experience in developing solutions for authoring, organizing, structuring, and managing content.

Alex helps documentation teams find the most effective ways to single-source, publish, maintain, and deliver content. Alex develops content management strategies, advises companies on choosing right techniques, technologies, and tools, and teaches documentation teams to use content management concepts in practice.

Alex Masycheff is an experienced trainer and frequent speaker at content management events.