TCS 4 as DITA out-of-the-box solution

[Roger Shuttleworth]

Hello Gillian

Regarding your question about TCS4 being the "complete solution" for 
DITA. You have to analyze that statement rather carefully and remember 
it's from the evangelist! The comments below are from a TCS4 user.

First, several of the components of TCS4 have nothing at all to do with 
DITA - Captivate, Illustrator, RoboScreen Capture, and Acrobat. That 
basically leaves FrameMaker and RoboHelp as candidates. So right there 
you ask yourself: would buying just FM and RH be better and/or cheaper?

FrameMaker does come with DTDs, EDDs, and templates provided, so you can 
immediately create, save, and open DITA XML documents. You'd want to 
tweak the templates, of course, and it helps if you are familiar with 
EDDs. As an XML editor, FM11 in my view is a big step forward from 9 and 
10, but I doubt it can compete with oXygen or xMetal (I have not used 
the latter). The ability to output fine PDF is a key difference in 
favour of FM. There are some deficiencies in FM, which Scott Prentice 
has identified in his comparison at 
http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/featurecomparison.php (that comparison 
covers FM10 but not 11, but it's still applicable). You may want to 
supplement FM11 with DITA-FMx, though there are pros and cons for that too.

Moving on to RoboHelp: RH was fundamentally designed as an HTML 
authoring tool. Integration with FrameMaker has been cobbled into it, 
and it works on book files, not ditamaps. So you have to create your 
book from a ditamap in FM, then open the book in RH. RoboHelp can also 
process ditamaps directly, but it rather depends on the day of the week 
and how you hold your mouth. I sometimes have a problem with the mouth 
part. DITA support in RH has a loooong way to go, and the glowing 
reports I read of DITA support in WebWorks (not cheap) give me the 
impression that is probably the better tool.

Having said all that, yes, you can use TCS4 to output DITA to PDF and 
HTML (we do it). If you don't want impressive PDF, FM is inferior to the 
alternatives you mention. If you're happy to just have FM and forgo the 
other TCS4 components, there are other tools you could use with FM alone 
to create output from DITA files: WebWorks, as mentioned, DITA2Go, etc.

Hope this helps alleviate some of the marketing overhead!

Roger Shuttleworth
London, Canada

On 26/11/2012 2:08 PM, Gillian Flato wrote:
>
> I went to a presentation last week given by Maxwell Hoffman from Adobe 
> on TCS v4.x. He stated that TCS v4.x is an out-of-the-box DITA 
> solution that contains DTDs, EDDs, etc, so you don't have to go to 
> third-party solutions to obtain the necessary pieces.
>
> Has anyone used TCS v4.x as a complete DITA solution? Are you liking 
> it? Is it better or worse than using, for example, XMetal or Oxygen 
> with 3^rd -party scripts, etc.
>
> *Thank You,*
>
> **
>
> *Gillian Flato*
>
> *Senior Content Developer*
>
> *Skype: Gillian.B.Flato*
>
> *Gillian.Flato at nexenta.com*
>
>
>
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