What do shortdescs and conditional processing have to do with Adaptive Content, that trending phrase in Web content circles? As with comedy, it's all in the timing and delivery. Don will give his perspectives on the popular Adaptive Content conversation and show how DITA has always been adaptive (depending on timing and delivery), followed by discussion and hilarity.

The slides were authored as DITA topics (as you might expect) and presented using a Prezi-like tool called Impress.js, and are available from contelligencegroup.com ..

• Presentation slides (click Start Slideshow)

A recording of the meeting is available in two parts. The first 48 minutes is the main presentation, and the remaining 33 minutes is the discussion that followed.

• Part 1 - Presentation (48 mins)
• Part 2 - Q & A (33 mins)

If you attended this meeting, I encourage you to add comments and include any notes you took as well as any additional comments or observations you'd like to offer. Otherwise, we'd appreciate hearing your thoughts or experiences with adaptive content and DITA.

He also presented DITA InMap editing. This is a feature of RocketSled which allows you to edit topic content directly from the DITA map, providing a more linear, multi-topic, authoring experience.

Compared to other Word-based XML editors I've seen, this solution seemed quite robust and feature rich. It provides access to all of the DITA attributes and elements (DITA 1.2 model), and would be fairly easy for the novice or occasional author to jump in and produce well structured content. (Of course, it does help if the author is reasonably familiar with the DITA model and topic-based authoring.) Although the current implementation supports the DITA 1.2 "model," it does not yet support all of the features of that model (specifically, the various referencing features). We were told that these will be available soon.

I can see the InMap editing feature being quite popular, and the import, export, round-tripping looked to be very well thought out. As long as the DITA files produced by RocketSled are valid DITA (which I have no reason to think they are not), it should play nicely with other editors, and could fill that void as an authoring tool for those who want to provide content but don't want to deal with the overhead of more full-featured DITA editors.

I look forward to seeing this tool again after completing the integration of the DITA 1.2 feature set.

For more information on RocketSled, visit the Crowell Solutions Blog:
Converting Word to XML - Introducing RocketSled 2 XML

Since the third Monday in February is President's Day, we'll have this month's meeting on February 11.

More information will be posted when it's available, but if you're interested in presenting or guiding a discussion on your favorite DITA topic, please contact me.

Happy New Year!

Simon started with an overview of XSL-FO, discussing the basic concepts as well as its strengths and weaknesses. He then explained how to develop a "plugin for the plugin" to allow you to easily (well, that may depend) create customizations to the DITA-OT PDF2 plugin.

If you took notes or have some comments, please feel free to add them to this page!

2012-08-FO-for-SVDIG.pdf - Simon's presentation slides.

Thanks Simon!

Bernard starts off by scoping and planning the project with a spreadsheet (see Estimates.xlsx) which lists the topic type, file name, title, short description and other properties of each file to be created. This not only helps in the planning process but with a little setup (and programming) you can use this information to generate the map and stubs for all topics and a prototype of the documentation deliverable in whatever formats are needed. This initial prototype can be used as the first draft of the document to be signed off by all those involved. You can use the spreadsheet to track progress (or the lack thereof) throughout the project.

Bernard demonstrated that with DITA, "content is king," and the tools used for authoring and publishing aren't as important as they were before XML authoring. He worked with the files in his sample project in a number of editors, and outlined the strengths and weaknesses of each tool (oXygen, XMetaL, FrameMaker, and Serna Free). Because your content lives in XML, you're free to mix and match editors as needed for your workflow. Different authors may have different needs, and DITA can accommodate that quite nicely as long as you're working with a DITA-compliant editor. He then imported the content into a CMS (easyDITA), to show the potential benefits of a browser-based editor.

Be sure to check out Bernard's website, in particular the resources area ..

• Slides and FIles
• Books and Articles
• Webinars and Videos

Thanks Bernard!

We used The DITA Style Guide, by Tony Self, as our guide as well as one source for a possible solution when you run into a DITA tagging problem.