Repurposing DITA Content for Microsoft Office Users
Technical communicators around the globe use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to help them create structured, semantically rich, topic-based technical documentation designed for reuse. The benefits of DITA, including content reuse, are limited to content teams who use XML editing tools. Content creators working with Microsoft Office tools cannot reuse DITA content easily, so content silos coalesce around the tools that content teams use.
It’s one thing to understand the value of content reuse. It’s another to find a solution that defeats tool-driven content silos so that teams who don’t have access to—or knowledge of—XML editing tools are able to effectively reuse and repurpose DITA content. Attend this free, one-hour Content Wrangler webinar, brought to you by the content management gurus at Astoria Software, to learn how technical content teams are sharing and repurposing DITA content with team members who create content using Microsoft Office software.
I'm currently not doing ANYTHING with DITA at work and don't plan to ever. The content in Word documents that others in my department create range from "lightly structured," which I would define as having heading styles for a table of contents with manually formatted Normal style everywhere else to "unstructured to the extreme," which I would define as not even having heading styles for a table of contents with manually formatted Normal style everywhere else. DITA is not close to being close to being close to being close to being added to my radar. While I certainly "get" the idea of DITA and structured writing, I have to be upfront when I confess I haven't found a clear cut reason why the type of structured writing DITA makes it easy to do cannot be done in "straight HTML" using CSS. If I have a CSS style defined as "ProcedureOverview" and use it every time I write about the overview for a procedure, isn't that good enough?
All that aside, the seminar is 1 hour in length and happens later today.
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