Friday, March 03, 2006
Using the tools you promote
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of articles and whitepapers about DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based framework for authoring and publishing technical documentation). It’s a very interesting concept and could be the next big thing in creating documentation.
But what struck me about many of these articles and whitepapers – usually in PDF format – is that many weren’t authored or published using DITA. Many were written in FrameMaker or Word. It makes me wonder whether or not the authors of these documents have enough confidence in DITA to use it for their publishing tasks. And if it’s a matter of aesthetics, consider this: many of the documents that that I’ve seen which seem to have been authored and typeset using DITA look quite good.
I don’t mean to single out DITA – I’ve seen documents about, for example, DocBook written using Word or FrameMaker. I’m not immune to this either, by the way. While I try to use the technologies – like DocBook or LaTeX – that I espouse, I sometimes fall back on OpenOffice.org Writer or XHTML to create certain documents.
But what struck me about many of these articles and whitepapers – usually in PDF format – is that many weren’t authored or published using DITA. Many were written in FrameMaker or Word. It makes me wonder whether or not the authors of these documents have enough confidence in DITA to use it for their publishing tasks. And if it’s a matter of aesthetics, consider this: many of the documents that that I’ve seen which seem to have been authored and typeset using DITA look quite good.
I don’t mean to single out DITA – I’ve seen documents about, for example, DocBook written using Word or FrameMaker. I’m not immune to this either, by the way. While I try to use the technologies – like DocBook or LaTeX – that I espouse, I sometimes fall back on OpenOffice.org Writer or XHTML to create certain documents.
