Feature articles by DITAWriter or by other contributors.
DITA is XML, so any XML editor can be used to write DITA code. But that doesn’t mean every XML editor is best suited for the job of producing DITA. As DITA has grown in popularity in the technical writing field, the market has matured and a number of XML editors have appeared that areRead More
A longer version of this piece originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of CIDM’s Best Practices Newsletter as “DITA Diversity in Technical Documentation”. The full version (PDF format) is available courtesy of IXIASOFT. While we are still far from seeing DITA as the default choice for technical documentation around the world, what is apparentRead More
When I was updating the Companies Using DITA listing I made a point of double-checking the type of firm claiming to use DITA. I discovered that I had a number of firms listed were in fact in the business of DITA consulting, and so aided their clients in moving to DITA, and realized that theseRead More
DITA Europe 2014 was held November 18th – 19th in Munich, Germany. The conference was a great opportunity to connect with other DITA users to share our experiences, knowledge and developments in the world of DITA. Slow but steadily growing DITA usage in Europe I had the honour of co-presenting this year’s keynote alongside JoAnnRead More
Analyzing the Results from the WritersUA 2014 User Assistance Tool Survey This past Saturday WritersUA came out with its 2014 User Assistance Tool Survey, based on a wide-ranging poll of those working in the technical writing field. If you look at the WritersUA page it simply displays the raw poll results without any analysis. ItRead More
In the first part of this series I looked at which DITA-capable CMSes are the most-widely used, and looked at some of the reasons for the relative popularity of these systems. In this article I look at the sizes of firms that are choosing DITA CMSes and which sectors they come from. It is clearRead More
Easily the most visited page on this website is the DITA CMSes page, listing all of the DITA-capable CMSes I have been able to track down. It typically gets several hundred visits per month—closely followed by the list of DITA Optimized Editors and the DITA-related Software Tools pages—telling me that there’s a strong need outRead More
Update March 12, 2015: Just wanted to note that the upward trend in Technical Writer hires continues, and in fact for this month (March 2015) I have just recorded the highest number of job postings for Technical Writers since I started keeping track of things three years ago. Expect an update on this and moreRead More
Over the past weekend I worked on updating the popular Companies Using DITA listing and it has reached another milestone: over 450 firms using DITA as part of their technical documentation processes are now listed. The permanent home for this list can be found here. DITA Ubiquity? One thing I came to realize as IRead More
Update June 13, 2014: You can now watch a webinar where Phil Kneer and I talk at greater length about the subjects covered in this article, courtesy of Data Conversion Laboratory. The DITA + RWD examples shown at the end of the presentation are available from the Yellow Pencil website, and the original slidedeck versionRead More
