Dr Tony Self’s DITA training courses in London

Cherryleaf and Dr. Tony Self co-host DITA training workshops in London each year. Courses include

  • DITA authoring best practices
  • DITA Publishing
  • Introduction to DITA
If you’d like to be kept up to date about DITA courses in 2013, then you should let us know by email.
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About the trainer

Tony is based in Australia, and he also known as “Dr. DITA”, as he has a PhD in DITA. He is also the author of “The DITA Style Guide”.
www.ditastyle.com?

Who are these for?

These courses are for anyone planning to move to a DITA-based authoring and publishing system, implementing DITA or wanting to get the best out of their existing DITA implementation.

DITA authoring best practices

As more companies implement DITA to streamline the development of documentation and user assistance, best practices for DITA authoring are being established. While the OASIS DITA standard provides rules for the use of elements and attributes, it does not provide clear guidelines for how to practically apply the mark-up, and how to create consistency so that DITA documents can be more readily interchanged. DITA has the potential to change habits of composition, expression and presentation for a broad range of writers and in so doing enhance productivity across a number of industries and occupations.

Adopting best practices will enable authors to maximise their productivity. In traditional authoring, best practices are often captured in a style guide, providing real-world examples and clear recommendations. However, existing style guides are written for style-based authoring, and not for DITA’s semantic mark-up approach. Tony Self has analysed the way in which DITA has been used, and has developed a DITA Style Guide to fill the gap between the DITA standard and traditional style manuals. In this workshop, Tony describes what constitutes best practice in DITA, explains the rationale behind the commonly used DITA elements and structures, and works through practical examples of best practice decisions.

What you will learn

  • The principles of DITA and semantic mark-up
  • The practical implications of the separation of content and form
  • How structured authoring requires a different set of style rules to style-based authoring
  • How consistent mark-up can enable efficiency of authoring and interchange of documents
  • The core principles of minimalism and context-agnostic writing
  • How practical examples of element selection can simplify DITA adoption
  • How standard approaches can create simple solutions to mark-up dilemmas
  • The challenges of best practices when using DITA specialisations