Tag Archives: keyref

DITA Linking Best Practice

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Join us (Jang & Magda) for a day’s Master Class on DITA Linking Best Practice at Information Energy 2015

As users of technical information (in a manual, in embedded help or on the web), we use links all the time. Sometimes they lead to the exact topic we need and sometimes we end up running around in a wild goose chase.

So how do you make sure that your users find their information quickly and easily? By setting up the right linking strategy for your product and your business domain. This sounds easier than it might be, as there are various linking strategies and not one of them is the best in all possible situations.

This master class teaches you about the available link management strategies in DITA and gives you a sound basis to decide which strategy works best for your information products.

We’ll explore the various types of linking with hands-on exercises:

  • Element-level linking: linking to graphics, tables, steps, files.
  • Hierarchy linking: links generated by nesting, family collections, sequences.
  • Relationship tables: bidirectional links, uni-directional links, collections.
  • Subject-scheme maps: taxonomy and topic assignment.

Each section starts with a conceptual overview and a set of practical tips and tricks, followed by hands-on work using your own set of DITA topics and maps on your own computer. Each practical session ends with a group session in which you exchange experiences and learn from each other.

After attending this workshop, you will be able to choose a linking strategy that fits your information products like a glove.

Date: June 2, 2015
Time: 10:00 – 16:00
Location: Academiegebouw, Utrecht
Language: English
Costs: €395, including lunch and drinks (Early Bird: €295)

Register for the Master Class “DITA Linking Best Practice”

Related links:
Information Energy 2015
JANG Communication
PANTOPIX

Spice up Your DITA Workflows – Flashback tekomRS

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Part two of the flashback series recalls my prezi “about… DITA, of course” as @georgebina said, at the tekom Europe Roadshow in Bucharest.

The RoadShow story

After George has shown their efficient recipes for using DITA along the software documentation lifecycle at Syncro, I just suggested a few more spices to make a writer’s life a bit easier.

Sometimes it feels like the only constant in a technical writer’s work is change. Whether in agile or waterfall, project teams tend to place documentation towards the end of the process, or leave them at least one iteration behind. So after documentation is reviewed, approved, integrated in the kit and sent to translation, you notice the final seasoning: “minor” changes in the product right before the release. A modified label here, a moved button there… are exceptions to the “code freeze”.

Spice up your DITA workflows
But change is good, and you’re already at great advantage if using DITA. Indeed, you can make your documentation flexible and agile, by adding a few scripts to your DITA projects, to keep up with the changes in the products you are documenting.

Let’s see some examples for frequent updating of:
– strings in the user interface
– reference code
– application screenshots
– in-line code documentation

In the case of GUI strings, you can use keys in DITA, so that you wouldn’t have to worry about changes in all the topics. You just update the values in a keymap, or even use different keymaps in the same project, for different versions of the product.

<step>
   <cmd>Under <option keyref="mnu_sound-sch"/> select
     <uicontrol keyref="btn_nosound"/>.</cmd>
</step>

The special spice would be generating the keymaps on the fly, with a script like “ini2dita”, “csv2dita”, “xls2dita”… Talk to your developers and see how you can integrate the docs with the localization strings.

Keeping sources like the code samples, or 3rd-party licenses, in separate files, allows you to integrate them in your DITA content with coderef, increasing the flexibility of your projects.

<stepxmp>
   <codeblock outputclass="language-ini">
      <coderef href="codesample.bat"/>   
   </codeblock>
</stepxmp>

If you are using screenshots in your documentation, it is also best practice to refer to them by keys. Thus you can have separate sets of images for various product flavours and languages.

<stepresult>
   <image keyref="scn_sound-settings"/>
</stepresult>

Imagine you could even have the screenshots generated automatically. Wouldn’t that save a great deal of time? Tools like AutoHotkey and WinSpy might help.

Another advantage with DITA is you can apply an XSLT transformation of the in-line code documentation written by developers, like for example Python docstrings in rST, and even do the round-trip between rST and DITA formats. This method allows developers to keep writing in their favourite environment and you can even supply edited versions back to them in the same form. More about this in April at DITA NA in Chicago.

With these few seasoning ideas for your DITA workflows, you can save a lot of time and frustration when updating documentation projects, and you increase their accuracy and consistency. Give it a try!