Interest in XML publishing and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard is growing at an exponential rate.
Designed as an “XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering readable information as discrete, typed topics,” DITA is the first topic based XML standard for technical publications.
DITA allows technical publications departments to enjoy the benefits of content reuse due to the requirement to author content in ‘topics’ defined as ‘discrete units of information’. As opposed to traditional sequential authoring as in the case of DocBook, content can be reused in different contexts for differing audiences. As XML is format neutral, multi-channel publishing of content to differing media such as Help, HTML or print is possible.
In response to a growing interest from technical publications departments in adopting XML publishing processes, Mekon are developing a FrameMaker publishing adaptor for DITA. This adaptor utilises FrameMaker’s powerful pagination engine to format output documents when using DITA.
