Group Wellesley Wire

Leximation, Inc. has announced that the DITA-FMx 1.0 plug-in has been released. This plug-in improves upon the DITA support provided with FrameMaker 8, including increased coverage of the DITA specification and improvements to the authoring experience.

The DITA specification presents rather steep challenges to tool implementers. The Leximation plug-in further enhances FrameMaker as an option for DITA authoring and publishing. Given the complexities of XSL-FO for generating PDF output, and the recent uncertainty regarding PDF support in the DITA Open Toolkit, FrameMaker should be especially appealing for organizations that need high-quality PDF output from DITA.

The DITA-FMx 1.0 plug-in supports DITA version 1.0. Support for DITA 1.1 is forthcoming, and will be provided at no charge to those who purchase DITA-FMx 1.0.

I enjoy a journey to Europe once or twice a year, and this year is no exception. Over the next two weeks, I will be participating in several events:

• The annual tekom/TCWorld conference takes place again in the beautiful German city of Wiesbaden, November 7-9. I will be presenting two sessions, Using DITA with FrameMaker, and Developing DITA Maps. This is my third visit to this conference.
• I am privileged to visit Manchester England on November 10 and 11. I will be supporting the STC UK chapter wth a two-day workshop on DITA, DITA authoring tools, and the DITA Open Toolkit. Participants will have the opportunity to use two popular DITA authoring tools (FrameMaker and XMetaL), use the DITA Open Toolkit for publishing, and develop DITA specializations. Participants will receive a free copy of Mif2Go, a wonderful multi-purpose conversion utility for FrameMaker documents. Mif2Go has recently added unstructured FrameMaker-to-DITA conversion support.
• November 13 - 14 brings me to Brussels for the annual DITA Europe conference. This is my first time at DITA Europe, but JoAnn Hackos always runs outstanding events. I will present on DITA Rapid Prototyping with the IBM Task Modeler. This is one of my favorite techniques with one of my favorite (and under-publicized) tools, the IBM Task Modeler.

Registration for each event is still open. If you are in Europe and are looking for a relatively low-cost training experience, I especially recommend the STC UK DITA workshop. As usual, I look forward to seeing many of my “virtual” colleagues in person at these events.

Two notable DITA tutorials have come online recently. In the “getting started” category, the tutorial at http://www.lone-dita.com provides a introductory overview of DITA. It was compiled by a member of a small documentation team as result of their effort (successful, I presume) to deploy DITA. The tutorial is concise, yet surprisingly thorough, covering DITA topic types, maps, conrefs, metadata filtering, and the DITA Open Toolkit.

On the other end of the spectrum, fellow DITA Technical Committee member Eliot Kimber has created a tutorial on the subject of DITA specialization. I often find specialization to be more challenging in practice than in theory, and Eliot’s tutorial is a welcome resource.