Single sourcing with DITA - compile issues

[wclass]

I am experimenting with exporting DITA files from Flare but I'm having trouble getting anything to work other than a new sample project. However, that doesn't tell me enough about my own help systems. Has anyone had any success? At this stage I'm still testing to try to see what I can get out of the system, so I thought I'd post a few findings - love to hear what others have found.

I created a DITA target in one of my current projects but I got a whole truckload of errors before it just expired: things like "miniTocProxy in file", "toggler found in file", "nested table found - not allowed in output" etc ... And it finally bombed with "index out of range".

I thought I'd just generate a few topics to start with, but it seems you can't apply conditions on DITA output so the system tried to generate dita files for every single topic in my project (hundreds and hundreds). For example, it would make sense to me to just exclude the topics with miniTocs in them. It would also be easier to get my topics "dita-ready" if I could check a few at a time.

Is there a list of places/styles where Flare will not be able to convert topic content to dita?
Is there a reason why we can't select only a few files at a time using Flare conditions?

I saw on some earlier threads people asking why you would want DITA when Flare has fine output formats already. Here's my scenario where I think dita might be useful.

We have several dozen projects under Flare at the moment, producing a mixture of CHM, webhelp and Word output. Those projects include, amongst other things, content like product overviews, brief descriptions and detailed descriptions. Every now and then I'm asked something like ... "Have you got a 2 paragraph overview of the XYZ function?" or "is there a list of all the fields on ABC". To date, I copy and paste into email and forward it. I don't format this for anyone as they use the info in many different ways. I don't think "copy/paste" is the best way to manage "single sourcing". I'd like to keep authoring this information in Flare and using it in my own help systems, but it would be great to be able to share information like this in a standard XML format, aka, DITA format.

[forfear]

margaret it sounds like a case for the Madcap dev team. Even if Flare already has other nice outputs, i think its really good that you are exporting to DITA and working with that. No point going to Flare 6 or 7 if the DITA export is not clean enough yet. Am sure everyone and the mad team would benefit from it.

Am not sure what the real cause is. am pretty sure if it was something super major it would have been caught in the beta actyually.


nonethless, perhaps its best now for to just attach a copy of the sample project for the dev team. if they can reproduce it, am pretty sure they'll give you a solution asap. They work pretty fast and are pretty sharp.