[Sigia-l] Best Tools/Processes for Structured Doc?

[Booher, Craig]

There is an active DITA user group (dita-users at yahoogroups.com;
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users) where I'm sure you could
obtain some excellent advice.

Craig


Craig S. Booher
Technical Information Coordinator
Kimberly-Clark Corporation
P.O. Box 2001                                         Phone:
920/721-5219
Neenah, WI  54957-2001                          Fax:  920/721-8471

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Chris Thompson
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 10:12 PM
To: Sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Best Tools/Processes for Structured Doc?

The company I work for has tens of thousands of topics that have been
written in XML against a complex proprietary system of custom XML
schemas
that are largely based on DITA. The problem is that we've lost the
programmers who supported the system. The build process that our
programmers
managed involved XSLT, XSL-FO, and supporting applications, including
SAXON,
to generate WebHelp and PDF. Unfortunately, there's a lot I don't know
about
what the programmers previously did to maintain our doc system and
schemas,
and budget won't allow for hiring on another team of programmers.

Our options as writers are:

(1) Hire a single programmer who may eventually be able to resurrect the
elaborate help-build process that apparently required a team of
programmers
to maintain and customize in the past.
(2) Abandon our legacy processes and import our XML source files into a
simpler, well-supported DITA-based authoring- and build-process
environment
(e.g., FrameMaker 7.2 and DITA).

In particular, I'm curious about the following:
- How much infrastructure is required to deliver help builds using a
straightforward DITA model (though I'm not sure how well our XML sources
can
be transposed from their custom schemas into DITA).
- Which tool would be your top pick for authoring with DITA (FrameMaker
7.2., XMLspy)?

Any advice you may have will be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris 


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