How does Flare support DITA?

[tomjohnson1492]

I read an article today that said, "On March 17, MadCap announced the launch of its XML Documentation Suite to provide a native XML alternative to Adobe. The product offers authoring, review, collaboration, analysis, translation, and localization tools, including an authoring tool that supports DITA." (http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/Art ... leID=48822)

Is this an error? How does Flare support DITA?

[forfear]

this is my take, based on my oh so surface knowledge of DITA ..:

Topic based authoring...DITA
Multiple TOC....DITA Outlines
Multiple target ouputs ....DITA XSLT transforms

these are the things that appear to support DITA to me...but i think if i were more knowledgeable about DITA,

there might be more things about the above that is NOT DITA compliant in Flare or Blaze i guess.

[odyssey]

This is pretty timely for me - my company made a first version of our methodology in xml using dita-dtd, and I need to take it over. I am interested in using Flare, but it will mean a big additional workload if I can't import the work already done.

[forfear]

I think DITA is as much about adopting a mindset. It is about thinking about your documentation in terms of infinitely reusable, tagged, structured, standardized mini topics instead of books and pages. I am sure there's a good sentence in there somewhere...

A book is a collection of topics.

What topic are you interested in?
What topic do you need?
What topic should you write?

And a bit less of:
What book do you want?
What guide should you write?
How many pages should this book be?

DITA is less about being just another XML standard. I still think it is sometimes.
f you adopt the approach correctly, of course you'll save time, money, make many friends and improve quality...wow! In comparison, traditional approaches of 'documentation' have been structured thinking in terms of books, number of pages, etc.

The rather popular recent DITA podcast on http://www.idratherbewriting.com about DITA made me think about how much a lot of current online help architectures have ALREADY adopted a lot of the topic oriented approach in the 'oh so yesterday' last 5 years or so.

Relationship tables ---- Table of Contents/ Outlines
XSLT transforms ---- Multiple target outputs
Stylesheets ------- Stylesheets
Topic Types ( Task Concept Reference )---- I guess if you named your topics like how Microsoft does in its newer Visual Source Safe 2005 help, you could have topics like How to: , Reference: and Concept in the title. See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... S.80).aspxfor examples.
.dita topic files ---- .htm topic files

PS. however, if your project is about being DITA compliant to be future proof, this may not be a good enough comparison. All this DITA stuff has a whole new world of new terminology i am not terribly good at.

Sharon Burton's (Blaze Product Manager) has a short post on this on her blog. Good stuff. The link is somewhere on the http://www.madcapsoftware.com/support site.

I hope this post generates a little more discussion on the forums... good topic

[beagley]

Perhaps it would be accurate to say that Flare can be used with the DITA philosophy, but that it might lack some nifty tools for managing things in a DITA way? It seems to support the topic-based, chunk-based approach that people talk about in relation to DITA, and it has conditional structuring which could allow you to produce different versions of a document, but Flare lacks advanced tools for managing those chunks and building DITA document maps?

[Andrew]

Perhaps it would be accurate to say that Flare can be used with the DITA philosophy, but that it might lack some nifty tools for managing things in a DITA way? It seems to support the topic-based, chunk-based approach that people talk about in relation to DITA, and it has conditional structuring which could allow you to produce different versions of a document, but Flare lacks advanced tools for managing those chunks and building DITA document maps?

DITA is also a set of XML specifications, and as far as I can tell, Flare does not support them at all. Its support for DITA appears to be "philosophically," as you noted. To me, that means DITA is not supported at all; merely structured, topic-based authoring, which is only a small part of DITA.

[forfear]

I guess Andrew nailed it correctly.

[BL_N]

I was just thinking about this the other day. Flare obviously does support the DITA content model in theory, as it is a topic based authoring system and the model is a topic-based one.

This said, it is very much a 'philosophical' support as opposed to a literal one. I am hopeful that it will progress to a more literal one with time.

My current project deals with helping a company migrate off of Framemaker and into a single-source solution. By the end of the analysis phase it was fairly obvious that they are not in a place technically to make the leap en totale to a DITA/XML environment. Flare is a timely solution for them because it gives them the chance to break their ties with print-centric help (which their customers have been asking for quite a while), move a little closer to the DITA content model for organization, and get to a single source solution without having to learn XSL-FO or even XML. The combination of Flare and the new Blaze functionality coming 'real soon now'(tm) will easily meet their requirements for some time to come.

On the other hand, I can think of several of my clients who are heading to DITA with vehemence and a tool without strict (rule enforced) compliance and the ability to template structure for use by 'non-technical' people simply will not make their short list.

Frankly, the Flare/Blaze combination is the closest thing I've seen to a true single source solution that is both affordable and within the realm of reasonable for the average company to implement. If they incorporate a strong support for DITA, there really is no reason to choose anything else. Were Flare to have some manner of DITA enforcement in place (ability to build content templates using DITA tags, DITA validation by topic, etc.) it would easily become number one on my recommendation list and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

[doc_guy]

I'd suggest that you continue to flood MadCap with your requests for DITA support by using their feature request form. The more people who request stuff, the better the chance of getting such features implemented (at least that is what MadCap staff have said previously in the forums.)

Submit your DITA requests (and all other requests as well) here:

https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[forfear]

Though this is an old post, i just noticed this case study (which i never noticed before) on the revamped madcapsoftware website.

Tony self, uses Flare to teach classess about DITA.
http://madcapsoftware.com/casestudy/Mad ... ersity.pdf

I imagine its used because as a tool it embraces the design 'philosophy' of DITA more, (instead of being adopeted because it is 'DITA-compliant') , and easier to help students approach and learn more about DITA. nice short case study.