Another DITA project...

Been a while since my last blog. How do all those twitters find the time to do it every single day?

I've been pushing DITA at my Marseille client for a couple of years now. Initially, they had agreed to trial it on some online help for a new project. Turns out a couple of customers had been complaining that information was only available online, whereas they'd like it in a User Guide format as well. So DITA was an easy sell. I did some templates in FrameMaker and used Leximation's DITA-FMx plug to produce a set of help files that looked pretty similar to the current lot, as well as a PDF containing pretty much the same information.

Throughout 2008, I did all the new product helps in DITA, and systematically produced a User Guide. It became known as the "new" help format (as opposed to the "old" help format). However, I remained the only writer using it: everyone else was still merrily tapping away in FrameMaker 7.2 (!)

Then in May 2009 I was summoned to a meeting at which they were going to decide between DocBook and DITA as the next Corporate documentation standard. One guy had gone so far as to convert an entire Word document into DocBook. I managed to get in a quick DITA demo, and fortunately the guy accepted that DITA was the better option. Within an hour, they had ditched FrameMaker in favour of DITA for all new documentation.

The only downside was that they want nothing to do with the FrameMaker/DITA-FMx solution. The problem they have had with FrameMaker is that developers and other engineers want to create official documents, and there's no way they were going to buy licenses and train everyone in FrameMaker.

So I was to do a customization of the DITA-OT PDF2 transform, which uses XSL:FO and FOP or XEP to generate PDF files. They gave me a mere 10 days to do this, which seems a little tight at the time and once I'd looked at the customization procedure seemed very tight indeed! A pilot project was selected and everyone seemed happy. Selling DITA really is easy.

Fast forward to early August and the template is done. Last week I sent it to a fellow tech writer and we got here to produce her first DITA-based PDF file within a day (spent almost entirely trying to generate a .BAT file that set up the DITA enviroment correctly).

The next step is to get all the writers and developers using DITA... but that will have to wait for the rentrée (a curiously French thing the rentrée... I used to think it was simply when the kids went back to school, but it's a much border cultural event. People lie on the beach all summer dreaming up schemes to get themselves promoted when they go back to work: the rentrée is when all these ideas are thrown at us poor contractors to implement. Strangelyl, it's also traditional in France to go on strike at this time... any minor complaint will do. I have arranged my holidays for the end of August/beginning of September specifically to avoid it).

Anyway, to conclude, I learnt a lot during those 10 days, and will try to document some of them here. While it may appear that this is to inform you, in fact it's just so that I don't forget these things the next time I do such a project (and I'm probably the only person that ever reads this stuff anyway...)