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Lu Hall
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What are you doing with DITA?
Posted on February 8, 2011 by Lu Hall
Wild and Wonderful
I’ve never thought of DITA as an output format. I read this post by Julio Vazquez nodding in agreement, but the comments were enlightening. They got me thinking and wondering about all the wild and wonderful things that people are doing with DITA.
There are a number of cool DITA projects that have been chatted up in blogs and tweets, many of which have, or will be contributed back to the community. For example:
- DITA4Publishers: A community project to enable the quick and productive use of DITA by Publishers, including plugins for generating EPUB and Kindle electronic books.
- DITA4All: Extending the range of application of DITA is a major goal of dita4all. They are developing techniques for creating websites based on DITA source files.
- DITA to Drupal: Building a DITA documentation distribution module for Drupal.
- DITA to WordPress: Developed a WordPress import module which will take the two-pane ‘Web Help’ output from the DITA Open Toolkit and import the hierarchy of XHTML pages into WordPress.
But what about the less publicized projects? What cool things are people doing with DITA, whether strictly using the Open Toolkit, or developing their own scripts or tools to solve every day business problems?
In her last post, Karen wrote about using Excel or OpenOffice Calc to create DITA markup. Other cool things we’ve done include:
- Combined our product content with our client’s content to produce a custom content solution. We initially used DITA’s chunking feature, and our java developers created a script to dynamically generate the custom map, using file naming conventions to find matching topics. This allowed our clients to add their content to whatever topics they wanted and eliminated the need to manually manage their additions.
- Generated HTML content that is then pulled into a Sharepoint site via a web part.
I’ve heard a lot of people ask about transforms for DITA to a slide show presentation. Last summer on an Advanced DITA course, I met Ben Colburn from Citrix. They took a different approach to the problem. Rather than create an XSLT transform to push content to a slide format, they developed some VB scripting to pull DITA content into Power Point. And they’ve contributed their code back to the community. (You can also check out a recent presentation Ben did with Joan Laselle of Laselle Ramsay on creating a business case for DITA.)
So, what cool and fun things you are doing with DITA? We’d love to hear about them and I’m sure our readers would too.
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3 Responses to What are you doing with DITA?
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I came to DITA based on a need to single-source documentation that would be both the inApp help for an iPhone application, and generate the support / marketing website. This is for a very small 2-person team. Learning DITA was hard, but it is paying off.
The app is Disaster Ready ( see dr.edgemoor.com for link to Apple App Store )
I also created a small open-source project to show how I used DITA to generate the App help -
Roman Math ( romanmath.edgemoor.com and d4i.edgemoor.com ).
Not the standard Dita stuff.
Very cool Chris. Thanks for sharing. Karen has a thing for the abacus, so I know she’ll love that app!