Accelerated Authoring™ @ Method M

The Claim: Everything takes longer with DITA

Over coffee this week I heard the complaint “everything takes longer with DITA” from a tech writer at a company that recently converted from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA. Why? Well you just can’t do File Open, add a paragraph or two, and consider your update done.

The Facts

The complaint may well be absolutely true – for the writer at the moment at the time of adding a paragraph. But it is absolutely false for the total document cost because DITA enables:

• Delivery of the content to the user in multiple instances (e.g. troubleshooting, installation, FAQ, etc.).
• Customization of the document for presentation to different types of users.
• Easy updating of the content.
• Definition of related topics (tasks that must be performed in a sequence, for example).
• Focusing information on what the customer needs at a particular moment (how-to information, for example, or reference content).
• And, of course, lower translation costs and much, much, much more.

The Bottom Line

Granted in some cases the productivity of technical writers may drop when writing a first draft, especially in the early stages of learning a new tool, but the total document cost will drop with DITA. Go for it!

Katriel

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under structured authoring, technical writing, technical documentation, DITA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.