Xml editors?

[Yves Barbion]

You're welcome, Steve.

Your engineers will need some training. They will have to learn the basics
of:

   - Structured authoring
   - DITA (main structures, content models...)
   - oXygen XML Author

The people who author content in DITA don't need to see or use the
templates or EDDs you're using in FrameMaker. All they need to do is make
sure that their topics are valid. When you open and edit these topics (or
maps) in FrameMaker, the corresponding structured application will be used
automatically. You, the technical writer, could also help the engineers by
creating some templates for them, but these would be "element templates,
i.e. topics of various information types which only contain the most
commonly used structures and elements and maybe some placeholder text. All
the engineers would then need to do is open one of these templates and
replace the placeholder text with real content.

oXygen has some nice features which really help non-XML-savvy people to
author valid topics, for example:

   - You can create a really simple workspace (called "layout" in oXygen)
   which you can share with them. We have created workspaces for subject
   matter experts (SMEs) which only display the DITA Maps Manager, the
   Attributes and Elements Lists and the main toolbars.
   - oXygen has on-the-fly validation, so it's really hard to create
   invalid topics.
   - oXygen automatically displays a brief description for each element
   which you wish to insert. This description is the one which you find in the
   DITA Language Specification:
   http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/spec/DITA1.2-spec.html
   - The latest version of oXygen (13) has some really nice "Smart Paste"
   features for content which you copy from a browser, Word or Excel.

My experience is that oXygen (for the SMEs) and FrameMaker with the
DITA-FMx plug-in (for the tech writers) make up a very nice "mixed DITA
editor" environment. You can find an example here of DITA content which we
have authored with both tools:

   - Original Webhelp: http://www.nomadesk.com/support/webhelp/
   - Rebranded WebHelp: http://www.novadrive.net/webhelp/welcome.php
   - PDF (generated with DITA-FMx):
   http://www.nomadesk.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Nomadesk_getting_started_guide_final.pdf
   - HTMLHelp (.chm): is included in the software itself. To see it, feel
   free to download and install a trial version of Nomadesk.

 Cheers


-- 
Yves Barbion
www.scripto.nu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20111115/a69fd9a6/attachment.htm>