Pragmatic DITA on a budget

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Pragmatic DITA on a budget

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ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication archive
Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication table of contents

Lisbon, Portugal

SESSION: Version control table of contents

Pages 193-198

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-083-8

Author

Joaquim Baptista

Altitude Software, Algés, Portugal

Sponsor

SIGDOC: ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communications

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 8, Downloads (12 Months): 51, Citation Count: 0

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ABSTRACT

A small documentation team working on a tight budget can now use the tool ecosystem enabled by the DITA standard to create the sophisticated content that previously required long and expensive projects. The author spent just nine person-weeks over three years to replace a custom XML system with a DITA system based on a combination of off-the-shelf software, authoring conventions, and custom scripts.

Key factors to minimize the required effort were the adoption of authoring conventions instead of specializing DITA topics and the use of folders instead of elaborate metadata. These decisions avoided the need to customize the editor and the toolchain, and simplified the creation of style sheets for the required output formats.

A small documentation team of five writers maintains over 6300 topics and publishes documents, online helps, and training materials. Open formats allow a custom script to generate reference topics from commented C# code.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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