OT: Software recommendations

[Yves Barbion]

Hi Roger

As Scott Prentice said, the DITA Open Toolkit and FrameMaker are not
mutually exclusive. If you want to author DITA-structured content in
FrameMaker, try Leximation's DITA-FMx plug-in, you'll love it:

http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/

If you want to see an example of various deliverables which were generated
from the same source (ditamap):

   - XHTML, generated with the DITA Open Toolkit:
   http://www.nomadesk.com/webhelp/welcome.php
   - PDF, generated with FrameMaker and DITA-FMx:

   http://www.nomadesk.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Nomadesk_getting_started_guide_final.pdf
   - CHM, generated with the DITA Open Toolkit:
   Included in the Help menu of Nomadesk (feel free to download and install
   a free trial to see it).

To include/exclude content and to create variants of your documentation, you
can use the DITA's conref and ditaval (conditional processing) mechanisms.

To generate output from your DITA content, you could use TCS2, but you can
also consider and test other tools like DITA2Go, MadCap Flare, WebWorks
ePublisher...

And if file management becomes too complicated, you have a wide choice of
DITA-aware content management systems. Bluestream XDocs, for example, is one
that plays nicely with FrameMaker and DITA-FMx. There is an XDocs webinar
recording on Youtube:

http://bit.ly/57EYwZ

Cheers


-- 
Yves Barbion • Managing Director • Adobe-Certified FrameMaker Instructor
www.scripto.nu  • skype: yves.barbion  • T: +32 494 12 01 89  • F: +32 9 366
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