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Archive for the ‘Coming soon’ Category

Functional Preview of DITA Visual Specialization Manager

Monday, December 7th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

Our development team is now actively working on release of first version of DITA Visual Specialization Manager (DVSM) that allows management of DITA Specializations in visual and easy way (for more details see: http://www.ditaworks.com/modeling/).

DITA Visual Specialization Manager is planned to be released this week, but now you have a possibility to get a first preview of available functionality by watching some fresh screen casts published on DITAworks website. These demos cover following functions of DVSM:

We are looking forward for your feedbacks on features presented there.

I remind that DITA Visual Specialization Manager will be available free-of-cost for non-commercial usage and for architects developing DITA models that are publically accessible.

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*instinctools to provide DITA Visual Specialization Manager free-of-charge

Friday, November 6th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

*instinctools GmbH has decided to provide free-of-cost licenses for its DITA Visual Specialization Manager, an application designed to make complex DITA specialization tasks easier to work with. These free licenses will be valid for unlimited time period but limited to the development and maintenance of open DITA Specializations e.g. specializations under OASIS for different industries such as Machine, Pharmaceutical etc. This offer is aimed at lowering the barriers to DITA usage and adoption. (more…)

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Networked Teams - Intelligent Content

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

…is the motto of this year’s Single Source Forum.

On June 22, 2009 *instinctools will present released DITAworks 1.1 as an important innovation on the 9th Single Source Forum in Munich.

This event is an ideal opportunity for visitors from all kinds of business areas to get information on challenges and innovations in the documentation world.

This year, emphasis is placed on new developments in the provision of information. How suitable are Web 2.0 technologies for the documentation environment? How can clients be directly involved in the creation process? And how do collaboration platforms promote the exchange of information?

Answers to these questions are given by acclaimed field experts in the form of lectures and practice examples on themes such as virtual team work, collaborative tools and user involvement.

Professor Dr. Volker Markl from the Technical University of Berlin opens the program with an exciting insight into the intelligent search machines of tomorrow. To round off the day, a panel of experts from science and business will discuss the latest trends in technical documentation.

In the accompanying exhibition, renowned software manufacturers present their proven tools and interesting new developments.

Visit our booth on Single Source forum..

More about Single Source Forum

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DITA Eclipse Editor: Using DITA for publishing documentation in Eclipse Help format. Functionality preview

Monday, April 27th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

This article discusses the main challenges that a documentation team faces when it decides to use DITA as a source format for Eclipse Help documentation. It also explains how DITAworks documentation tool plans to address these challenges.

About Eclipse Help

The Eclipse Platform includes its own help system based on an XML table of contents referencing HTML files.  This is a standard way to document Eclipse-based software products.

But eclipse help format is not reduced to usages only inside of Eclipse platform. It is available as standalone server solution and can be used for providing ANY help content via Web server. Eclipse help system provides such important functions like navigation through TOCs, search, indexing, bookmarking and s.o.

When Eclipse help is used for documentation of Eclipse-based software, it allows much more sophisticated mechanisms for context-dependent help definitions like: search expressions, contexts, so called cheat sheets and s.o.

Additionally, due to component-oriented architecture of Eclipse, Eclipse help is structured in form of plugins that can be independently deployed and interlinked. This enables creation of scalable documentation that fits to complex product configurations.

Eclipse Help and DITA

DITA as single-source architecture opens a promising approach for maintaining all your documentation in single format. Eclipse help as one of the publishing formats can address needs of context dependent application help as well as generic online help.

DITA Open Toolkit provides a way to transform DITA maps and topics into Eclipse help plugins, but these possibilities are quite limited. Namely DITA OT will generate a TOC file and set of HTML topics linked to source map, but it does not address following important specifics of Eclipse Help:

  • Definition of contexts (used for context-dependent help)
  • Interlinking topics between several Eclipse help plugins
  • Definition of search phrases
  • Definition of cheat sheets
  • Tuning of plug-in contents (Manifest properties, amount of TOCs, indexes, contexts and s.o.)
  • Some other advanced features of eclipse help.

These limitations are hindering adoption of Eclipse help as publishing output format for DITA content.  They need to be addressed if we want to use the full capability of Eclipse help system and this issue can be seen as a current challenge for DITA-oriented tooling.

(more…)

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Posted in Coming soon, Features, Problems and Solutions | 2 Comments »

Development Roadmap published

Saturday, March 28th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

I would like to draw some attention to DITAworks development outlook for 2009 that was recently published. It briefly describes major milestones and their targets. Some milestones are already having detailed description of planned functionality.

Roadmap will be regularly updated.

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