Author: saprentice

Meeting: Start Thinking Like a CCO (Chief Content Officer): Understanding the Corporate Value of Content Management

Cynthia Canino and Tim Bombosch of Astoria Software presented this thought provoking session on treating your content more like a corporate asset.

Think_Like_a_CCO.pdf

Meeting Notes

Pics from DJ Cline

Meeting: Writing Effective Task Topics in DITA

Another great presentation by Michelle Carey and Shannon Rouiller (Technical Editors and Architects at IBM)! They covered the fundamentals of creating a DITA task topic as well as some of the more controversial and confusing issues that writers run into when creating tasks.

DITATaskTopics_090310SR.ppt

Notes from Tom Idleman (Thanks Tom!)

  • Combine small tasks, such as “Click OK”, with more significant tasks in one step.
  • Beware procedures that simply list imperative steps to interact with the UI without setting context or talking about why the user is performing the steps: “1. Click A. 2. Click B. 3. Click C…”
  • 9 steps, maximum, per task topic.
  • Only describe one way to do something.
  • Tag optional steps with the attribute importance set to optional.
    Note that IBM output generates an “Optional” label for steps tagged with importance = optional. (The label is not generated with a pre DITA-OT 1.5 PDF processor, a known issue with previous versions of the standard PDF processor.)
  • Instead of tagging something like “The blah window opens” as a <stepresult> of a step, use the information to set the context of the following step: “In the blah window, do thus and so.”
  • Use <choices> when a user has several choices in a step that can be explained in a short phrase. Use <choicetable> when a user has a combination of options, such as “In Windows, do this. In Linux, do that.”
  • IBM uses standard headings in task topics for the various parts of the task topic as follows:
    • Before you begin (Prerequisite)
    • About this task (Context)
    • Procedure (Steps)
    • Example (Example)
      Or if a <title> element is used in the tag, the text Example is overridden by the text of the <title>
    • Results (Result)
    • What to do next (Postrequisite)
  • IBM uses inline icons: “Click the (graphic of icon) icon.”
  • IBM uses gerunds to start task topic titles: “Medicating Your Cat”
  • IBM tags command names with <cmdname> when talking about the command and <userinput> when the user has to type the command name at a command line.
  • To construct a supertask, or in other words, a task that consists of many subtasks, IBM uses the following strategy in a DITA map:
    • A concept topic <topicref> that points to a concept that talks about the overall supertask.
    • An attribute setting of collection = sequence for the concept topic <topicref>
    • Embedded <topicref>s that point to the tasks that make up the supertask within the concept topic <topicref>.
    • The result is a concept topic with numbered links to the tasks that make up the supertask that looks like the following:
      “Emergency Diving a Submarine
      When your boat is spotted, submerging quickly is essential. The emergency-dive process is both complex and unforgiving. The individual tasks must be performed in the proper order and in a timely manner:

      1. 1) Clearing the Bridge
        The first step of an emergency dive is to get all personnel off the bridge of the submarine and safely into the boat. Typically, the OOD (Officer of the Deck) yells “Clear the Bridge” and sounds two bells to signify an imminent dive.
      2. 2) Closing the Hatches
        Before a submarine can dive, all external hatches need to be closed. Typically, only the conning tower hatch will be open, but more might be open depending on recent activity on the boat.
      3. 3) Stopping the Engines
        Submarine diesel engines require air intake to function. To prevent possible damage to the engines, stop them before closing the main induction.
        …”
  • To set prerequisite tasks, IBM sets the importance attribute to required for prerequisite tasks. This automatically creates a link in the prerequisite section of subsequent sibling task topics to the topic that’s topicref is set to importance = required.
    Note that this doesn’t work for our standard output. It’s currently unknown whether our changes to the OOB OTK functionality is short circuiting this behavior or if IBM has added this to their output.

Meeting: Round table discussions — conversions, output, and authoring

We had a very lively and energetic discussion of various topics. I’ve organized them into three main groups below.

TOPIC 1: Converting unstructured content into DITA

Before conversion:

  • Perform document analysis; better to spend more time on this than not enough
  • FM – look into using the Remove All Overrides command to clean up files
  • Prototype project should not be the first book you want to convert. This should contain bits that represent all possible structures and components in your documentation set. Test and perfect the conversion, then test and prototype the various output options you plan to use.

Conversion processes/tips:

  • Use Mif2Go convert to DITA – export to Mif, then set up mif2Go config file to set up elements, wrapping syntax for Mif2Go, etc.
  • Use FM Conversion table to map styles to elements, wrap elements into other elements, etc.
  • Create a base topic for each section (Parse on Heading 2 or Chapter) to get files into DITA
  • Conditional text boundaries need to map to to element boundaries. This is applied as attributes on those elements. It’s often better to rewrite heavily conditionalized content into multiple paragraphs so you can apply conditions at the paragraph level.
  • Frame’s conversion tables don’t map conditions. Any tools that do?
  • Variables can become conrefs or just make them into plain text.
  • Remove inline cross-refs and create relationship tables.
  • The DITA 1.1 bookmap provides nodes for book-like structures like chapters, appendixes, and lists (TOC, index, etc.).
  • If using Frame for PDF output, your TOC and index can be FM generated, otherwise they are generated by the tool (OT, or ?).
  • If in doubt, shred your content to be more granular. It’s easier to merge multiple topics together than break them apart later. Don’t use “sections” if you can help it, they can probably be topics.

Best practices?

  1. Think about why you want to convert – based on current content, maybe only convert tasks, or other topics that are truly concepts or reference.
  2. How much material – manual or automated conversion
  3. How often you will convert – 1 time, or often
  4. Source material is in-house or external, both?
  5. How well or poorly structured
  6. Do a good doc analysis – go through doc set and see how well formed they are try to capture all use cases, what is in the docs? What do the styles mean?
  7. Too few or too many steps in conversion process – a step may have too much transformation , try small steps with iontermediate results to try out
  8. Prepare documents for DITA (to be good DITA) before conversion.

TOPIC 2: Options for generating output from DITA

  • The OT provides scripts for generating, CHM, HTML, Eclipse Help, Java Help, PDF, and more.
  • Basic output is not too hard, but styling/formatting can be very difficult for non-techie people.
  • Suite Solutions offers great training for the OT if you want to learn how to maintain things yourself.
  • CSS can be a simple way to customize OT output.

Options other than the OT:

  • DITA2Go can be a replacement for the OT; from makers of Mif2Go
  • RoboHelp
  • Flare
  • XMetaL comes with OT bundled so it may be easier
  • CHM to Web – generate HTML HELP from the OT and then use a template to convert to WebHelp
  • FrameMaker can be the easiest way to generate PDFs from DITA even if you’re not using FM for authoring.
  • DITA-FMx provides extended PDF/book publishing features.

TOPIC 3: Authoring tips and ideas

  • Author Assistant from SDL – Grammar Checker requires tweaking (free download for FrameMaker 9)
  • Capture “what do I do now” moments – what do you do when something does not fit the model. Good to review later and share with others.
  • See Megan’s SVDIG presentation on creating Supertasks (tasks with links to subtasks)
  • Indexterms in prolog, become meta keywords; this is good for HTML. Indexterms inline are good for PDF/print. Decide which is more important. Once you move indexterms into prolog it’s hard to get them back inline; investigate tweaking XSL to copy inline indexterms to prolog for both purposes.
  • DITA-FMx and Oxygen provide element sensitive online Help for DITA documents. Makes it easy to learn how things fit together.

» Thanks to Lauren Katzive for taking notes!