A collection of articles about DITA-XML, documentation management, productivity, and software.

Samalander has spent years in the technical writing industry, especially with small teams and businesses. We've seen the problems, we know what works, and here we provide some resources to help you as you work with DITA.

Articles

  • Suite Level Operation

    Most DITA XML authoring tools operate on individual DITA files or DITAMAPs. FrameMaker's primary organizing feature is the "book". oXygen and other DITA authoring tools' primary organizing feature is the DITAMAP. In other words these tools operate at a document level.

    But, as all technical writers know, this document focus is adequate for most writing but it is a disadvantage as soon as we have to deal with many titles, or worse, many titles maintained by many authors.

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  • DITA on your Local Disk

    Rumour has it that DITA XML requires a Content Management System (CMS). Fortunately that's not true for small groups and independent technical writers especially in the early stages of adopting DITA.

    This series of articles explains the how's and why's of doing DITA on your local disk, no CMS required.

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  • Version Control: Why is it Critical when Authoring DITA XML?

    Version control was invented to control software source files which are all text files. A version control system stores the changes from one version of a text file to the next.

    DITA XML files are also text files. Therefore version control systems provide the same reversion benefits enjoyed by software programmers.

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