Dinner's on Me

[Martinek, Carla]

Seriously. :) If you're interested in helping me out, contact me OFF LIST.

We've been wanting to convert our content to DITA for a couple of years now. This is one of my "spare-time" projects - and of course I never have any spare time because we have three fewer people than we did three years ago, but more products to document. I've done some webinars and one short seminar, been through some books, but haven't converted any of my content yet. I've got theoretical knowledge, but no real practical DITA XML experience.

However... I've just been informed that we will be meeting with Tech Support in a week or two to work on finally getting all of our content into XML so we can share it between the groups.

What I'm offering dinner  for is someone who is well-versed in DITA and FM and who is willing to convert some sample pages of our documentation (a few pages from our programming guide, and a few pages from the user manual) so that I can see what *my* content looks like as DITA. From that I can figure out my mapping tables going forward. We don't have the budget to send our content out for conversion, so I'll be starting with one guide at first and working from there as we update. It's going to be a FUN year for me!!! (Can you hear the sarcasm?) My first project will be an 1100-page programming guide. Fortunately, it's about 500 files, each of which is a command, so it's very repetitive in its structure. Get one command done, and I have the blueprint for the other 499.

Our source files are in FM9 (but I can provide FM8 if needed), and Structured FM w/DITA will be our XML environment at this time.  We use a LOT of conditional text because the content is shared across multiple product lines. We build chapters and books out of topical files, but content is not stored in a CMS at this time.

Dinner will be in the form of a gift card for your favorite chain dinner place (Applebee's, Fridays, Red Lobster, etc,  you pick what works for you). This is out of my pocket, not the company's, but it's to make my job easier going forward.


Regards, and many thanks
Carla
cmartinek at zebra.com

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