The business benefits of DITA – in graphic novel form

We’ve put together a free illustrated guide that explains the business benefits of the DITA authoring and publishing standard. It’s suitable for Technical Authors and non-Technical Authors. You’ll find this guide is in graphic novel (or comic) format, comprising 18 colour pages. You can download the guide from the Cherryleaf website in EPUB, PDF and… Read more »

How does DITA compare to a Help Authoring Tool?

One of the key questions when considering moving to the DITA authoring standard is: how is it different from what I have today? If you create technical documentation using a Help Authoring Tool, such as Flare or RoboHelp, you’ll probably want to compare DITA to these. It’s not as easy a question to answer as… Read more »

Which problems were the creators of DITA trying to solve?

We’re currently working on updating our DITA Basics training course. It’s likely we’ll offer the course as an self-study online course, a classroom course, and as a live tutor-led course delivered over the Internet. In carrying out this exercise, we realised that there was a need to answer some basic, fundamental, questions. So let’s look at some… Read more »

Reflections on the Congility conference

I spoke at the Congility (=”content agility”) conference, earlier in the week. It was a well run and interesting conference. Here are my post-conference reflections.

The number of companies using DITA – a story of success or failure?

It’s been seven years since DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) became an open standard. DITA, for those that don’t know, is an XML-based standard for structuring, writing, managing and publishing the type of content that you’d typically find in user guides, online Help and other technical documentation. Recently, the DITAWriter web site researched how many organisations… Read more »