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

[Gillian Flato]

Thanks, Scott!

-Gillian

From: Scott Prentice [mailto:sp10 at leximation.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 11:27 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com; Gillian Flato
Subject: Re: TCS 4 as DITA out-of-the-box solution

Hi Gillian...

As I'm sure you're aware, I'm a big proponent of using Frame for DITA authoring, but I do try to remain reasonably objective when comparing it to other DITA tools.

The big thing that sets TCS apart from other DITA authoring tools is that in addition to authoring, it provides a more complete publishing solution for both PDF and various online formats. Other authoring tools will likely bundle the DITA-OT as the publishing tool, which can work quite well, if you've got XSLT developers at your disposal. The HTML-based formats aren't too much work to customize, but if PDF is an important deliverable, you're in for a lot of time and money to get XSL-FO styleheets built that would be something you'd deliver to your customers.

Because TCS includes RoboHelp, you'll find it much easier to get online Help from DITA, and you'll be hard-pressed to get PDFs from the OT that come close to what you can get from Frame.

Personally, I use Frame for authoring DITA and Oxygen for coding XML/XSL. Oxygen is a great tool, but I much prefer the authoring experience with Frame over any other tool out there. I publish PDFs from Frame (via DITA-FMx), and use the OT for my online outputs (HTML, CHM, and EPUB). Samples here ..

    http://docs.leximation.com/dita-fmx/1.1/

If you do decide to use Frame/TCS for DITA, you should check out DITA-FMx, which provides numerous additional authoring features, as well as makes publishing complete and PDF-ready books much easier than the default options ..

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

Cheers,

...scott



Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com<http://www.leximation.com>

+1.415.485.1892




On 11/26/12 11:08 AM, 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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