Feature articles by DITAWriter or by other contributors.
While doing some DITA training recently for a client I ran across an idea that struck me as being a good way to avoid spaghetti code. In retrospect, it’s one of those obvious “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas: a specialized topic just for holding conref-able text. But first, I ought to explain whyRead More
One of the most interesting presentations I saw at the Ixiasoft DITA CMS conference back in June was presented by a Documentation Team Lead at Research in Motion (RIM). While these days the beleaguered firm is better known in the news for its revenue woes (though it is good to see some wins as well),Read More
The Webinar presentation I did yesterday afternoon on behalf of Data Conversion Laboratory has now been posted to YouTube. You can now watch this anytime. Enjoy! For those who just want the slide deck, here’s a copy of the PDF, and here’s a link to the original Prezi that it was derived from. Will beRead More
Currently I am working on updating the stats and images for my upcoming BatchGeo later this week, using the updated info from the Companies Using DITA listing. One of the things I wasn’t happy with was showing the worldwide and regional distribution of where the firms/organizations using DITA are located. I had been usingRead More
I just finished doing an overdue update to the popular “Companies Using DITA” listing, which now surpasses 300 firms and organizations, ranging from Abbott Laboratories to ZTE. This is likely still just the tip of the iceberg, as it is evident to me as I continue my research that there are many other companies andRead More
There’s just a few days to go before the big Content Management Strategies/DITA North America Conference in La Jolla, California. Am looking forward to presenting the keynote talk there, and to meet with other people in the industry and learn about the latest developments in DITA and technical documentation practice in general. I have learnedRead More
I liked a recent post on technical communications metrics on the the Mark Lewis blog recently, and while I don’t agree with the conclusion (any metric based on word counts and a subjective evaluation of quality is problematic IMHO) it did get me thinking about the topic of documentation metrics in general. I have doneRead More
(This article was originally published in CIDM Information Management News for March 2012. It is an update to a previous article by the same name on this site). It all started innocently enough with a simple question asked in a LinkedIn forum. I was looking for more information on companies that were using DITA forRead More
Update: new VMTurbo example (and link to info relating how it is produced) added July 11, 2014. If you are looking for examples of DITA-produced output, this list is for you. In my initial survey of Companies Using DITA, I found that while many firms are using DITA XML in their documentation efforts, the majorityRead More
Following the last article here that looked at the worldwide distribution of the firms and organizations that are using DITA, I have just re-launched an expanded version of the Companies Using DITA page that includes the geographic location of the city and country for a given organization’s HQ. There are now almost 250 companies listed,Read More
