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

[Gillian Flato]

Thanks for the response.

-Gillian

From: Roger Shuttleworth [mailto:shuttie27 at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 5:10 AM
To: Gillian Flato
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: TCS 4 as DITA out-of-the-box solution

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 3rd-party scripts, etc.

Thank You,

Gillian Flato
Senior Content Developer
Skype: Gillian.B.Flato
Gillian.Flato at nexenta.com<mailto:Gillian.Flato at nexenta.com>







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