Training and Tools for DITA

[Roger Shuttleworth]

Hi Joseph
  
  You don't appear to have any replies to this (but I don't receive all the list posts, for some unknown reason).

There are several ways to convert unstructured docs to DITA. There is some information available from Adobe at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FrameMaker/9.0/Using/WSC37A86FA-54BF-417b-B2AE-17009D223804.html.
Which method you use depends on your situation; in particular, how well structured your topics are already, and the volume of work you have to convert.


* Use a conversion table, as in the reference above.
* Save your FM docs to HTML (with some prior mapping of styles to elements), and use an XSLT transformation to convert to DITA topics. IBM has some resources in that area; see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita8a/.
* Manual tagging of content. This is the most laborious way, but it may be quicker for small amounts of material.
I'd be surprised if there aren't people on this list who have gone one or more of these routes and can provide more information. In any case, you should expect to do a fair amount of cleanup work. One tool I *highly* recommend for cleanup is West Street Consulting's FrameSLT; http://www.weststreetconsulting.com/WSC_FrameSLT.htm. Its Node Wizard will save hours of work.

Another suggestion is to join the FM-DITA group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/framemaker-dita/.

As for learning structured FM and/or DITA, there are many options. Adobe used to provide an XML Cookbook tutorial within the FM documentation, but I've not seen it since v.7 (pity). It was a good introduction to structured authoring; perhaps someone can send you the PDF.

Books: Kay Ethier's "XML and FrameMaker", http://www.amazon.ca/XML-FrameMaker-Kay-Ethier/dp/159059276X. I'm not sure whether this is up to date now, though. 

Check out www.scriptorium.com for more resources.

As for learning DITA, you can read the basics at  http://dita.xml.org/book/dita-wiki-knowledgebase. You can go to the other extreme and join the dita-users group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/. The discussions on this list will quickly induce narcolepsy, but pretty much everything DITA-wise is in the archives.

In my experience with both DocBook and DITA, once you have read the basics, the best way to learn the DTD is to use it in real life.

Hope this helps. There are tons of resources I've not mentioned, so I hope others will chime in. Feel free to ask more specific questions in you wish.

Roger

Roger Shuttleworth
Technical Documentation
AV-BASE Systems Inc.
1000 Air Ontario Drive, Suite 200
London, Ontario
N5V 3S4
Tel. 519 691-0919 ext. 330
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From: Joseph Lorenzini [mailto:panopticon23 at gmail.com]
To: FrameMaker Forum [mailto:framers at lists.frameusers.com]
Sent: Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:56:01 -0400
Subject: Training and Tools for DITA

Hi all,

I have a colleague who may want to make the jump into DITA. I am old school with unstructured FrameMaker but I know there's plenty out there but I'd like to get recommendations from you all. I am looking for FrameMaker plugins for 1) converting unstructured framemaker 9 files into DITA  and 2) that help with DITA authoring in general, though I believe FrameMaker's out of the box capabilities are pretty decent. Also, are there some good DITA tutorials out there? Cost is an issue for my colleague so closer to free would be preferable :).
  
Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini

    
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