greenfield and new structure

[Writer]

Congrats on the new job, John. Being the master of your own documentation is pretty awesome, eh?

>I would love to find some EDDs for basic DITA-compliant user manuals, and I'd love some war stories about getting Structured, tales of heroism and tragedy, etc. Please feel free to reply to me directly with comments not suitable for the broader community.
>This is going to be fun! 

I'm not clear on this. Are you saying that you have DITA files that were authored somewhere other than in FM, but you WILL be authoring DITA in FM in the future? If that's the case, EDDs are built into FM. Or did I misunderstand your question?

If you are authoring DITA in FM, you might want to browse this user group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/framemaker-dita/

Learning to author in DITA is not very hard. However, creating output can be very challenging, and learning to architect your process from beginning to end BEFORE you get started is very important. Production challenges can mean that you have to have make certain authoring decision/compromises. Sometimes those decisions can only be learned through experience, so you might want to check out lists about your processing tool, if possible. Forgetting about formatting while you author is also challenging at first, but important. Marking up content based on its semantic value, rather than for formatting, can take a while to get used to.

There's so much more that can be said. You're welcome to contact me offline if you have any questions. I don't use TCS4, so I can't answer RH questions.

Nadine