In this webcast, Sarah O'Keefe discusses the challenges of getting attractive output from DITA and demonstrates Scriptorium's approach to web-based help and PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit does not provide web-based help out of the box, so we extended the Open Toolkit to create it. For PDF, we have built a set of stylesheets that address the most common problems faced with DITA-based PDF publishing—enabling an index via FOP, page numbering, headers and footers, and the like. If your organization is planning to publish DITA content, this session is for you. We briefly discuss various options for creating output from DITA, and then show you SPSHelp (our web-based help) and Scriptorium's PDF framework.

1. is
Sarah O’Keefe
Scriptorium Publishing
background image
flickr: thelastminute

2. ❖ Everyone is muted except for the
presenter
❖ Please ask your questions through the
Questions area in the webcast interface
❖ The presentation is being recorded;
attendees do not appear in the
recording

3. ❖ Founder and president, Scriptorium
Publishing
❖ Content strategy for
tech comm
❖ Interested in collision of
content, publishing, and
technology

5. flickr: navin75

7. ❖ Lower your standards?
❖ DITA Open Toolkit
❖ Custom development
❖ Scriptorium plug-ins
❖ Other plug-ins (DITA4Publishers)
❖ Alternatives to the Open Toolkit

8. flickr: SurprisePally

9. ❖ Technology load and learning curve
❖ Ant, CSS, XSLT, HTML, XSL-FO
❖ Default plug-ins are not suitable for
production
❖ No support for web-based help
❖ PDF very difficult to configure

10. flickr: iwona_kellie

12. ❖ Does your audience care about
typographic niceties?
❖ Less sophisticated formatting = lower
implementation cost and greater
automation
❖ Especially helpful for PDF!

13. ❖ Provides output for HTML, RTF, PDF,
HTML Help, Eclipse Help, and more
❖ Extensible
❖ Challenging to configure
❖ Build automation and build integration
❖ Open source

14. ❖ Expensive
❖ Time-consuming
❖ Worthwhile for complex and
nonnegotiable requirements?
❖ Expert consultants are available (ahem)

15. ❖ Plug-ins run in Open Toolkit
❖ Collection of XSLT, XSL-FO, CSS,
graphics
❖ Can customize further
❖ Provides web-based help and more
reasonable PDF

16. ❖ ePub and Kindle output
❖ Word to DITA
❖ DITA to InDesign
❖ http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net/

17. ❖ Printed page layouts have more options than
HTML layouts.
❖ Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting
Objects (XSL-FO) needs to support
sophisticated page layout options.
❖ Pushing XML into page layout tools is
challenging.
❖ Automation means giving up page-by-page
formatting.

18. ❖ Page-based layout tools
❖ Help authoring/conversion tools
❖ High-end processors

19. ❖ Provide excellent PDF output
❖ Formatting templates easier than
DITA OT configuration
❖ Issues with XML white space
❖ Round-tripping is challenging
(FrameMaker) or nearly impossible
(others)

20. ❖ Many provide web-based help solutions
❖ Easier configuration than DITA OT

21. ❖ Based on DITA Open Toolkit pdf2
transform
❖ A standard Open Toolkit plug-in
❖ Addresses some of the most common
concerns with PDF

22. ❖ Page size and margins
❖ Font controls
❖ Header and footer
❖ Table of contents formatting
❖ Index generation (even in FOP)
❖ Index formatting

25. ❖ Added variables (and comments) to
basic-settings.xsl for many common
requirements
<!-- Scriptorium added controls for whether the current system date and
time appear in the footers.
Any value but yes for these variables will prevent the date or time
from appearing in the footers.
-->
<xsl:variable name="date-in-footers">yes</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="time-in-footers">no</xsl:variable>

26. ❖ Not provided in DITA OT
❖ Can use help authoring tools
❖ XMetaL and Trisoft include web-based
help output

27. ❖ Web-based help
❖ Provides tripane browser-based help
that is not available in Open Toolkit

30. ❖ $10,000
❖ Plug-in files
❖ Your customizations (fonts, logo,
headers and footers, page size, and
more)

31. ❖ $4,000
❖ Plug-in files
❖ Your customizations (CSS, logo, headers
and footers, and more)

32. flickr: blipsman

33. ❖ Platform requirements
❖ Technical resources
❖ Typography requirements
❖ Velocity
❖ Volume
❖ Versioning

34. flickr: bootbearwdc

35. ❖ Researching adoption rates, issues, tools
❖ Open until March 1
❖ Participants get free results
❖ http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/
structure
❖ Please participate, and tell your friends!

36. ❖ Tony Self on The DITA Style Guide,
March 9
❖ March: Trends in technical
communication, 2011
❖ April: Structured authoring survey
results

37. ❖ PDF plug-in: scriptorium.com/2011/01/
a-makeover-for-the-dita-ots-pdf-plugin/
❖ Contact us at info@scriptorium.com

39. ❖ Sarah O’Keefe
❖ www.scriptorium.com
❖ okeefe@scriptorium.com
❖ @sarahokeefe