
For over a decade, Extensible Markup Language (XML) authoring has offered benefits to publishing organizations, including content reuse, multichannel publishing, and standards-based information exchange. Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) offers a specific form of XML authoring that has the potential to revolutionize technical documentation. DITA represents a form of topic-based authoring, which has emerged as a best practice in technical documentation.
Adobe FrameMaker 8 has built-in support for the core features of DITA. This article offers a brief introduction to topic-based authoring with DITA and FrameMaker 8.
In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:
Familiarity with structured authoring and XML
Max Dunn is President of Silicon Publishing, an electronic publishing services company based in northern California. Silicon Publishing helps organizations automate publishing processes, including rendering single-source XML content to print and web.