Publish Documentation without Proprietary DTP Software
The DITA Open Toolkit, can create and transform DITA XML files into various useful, readable text formats. It’s been around for a while, but as you may know, it’s a lot of work to customize and efficiently use this toolkit. We’d like to announce our customized version of the toolkit: the SOPERA DITA Framework for processing and publishing user documentation. It’s a really nifty little framework that generates neat PDFs, Eclipse Helps, and HTML files from DITA maps and topic files without recourse to any commercial, proprietary DTP software applications. That’s right, for free!
Try it, Test it and Send us Feedback
Go ahead and try it out if you want to by checking it out of googlecode from here: sopera-dita-framework. Before you start, please do read the readme.txt file and the accompanying project wiki pages. Granted the content is sparse but we’ve busy been trying, testing and playing with our framework so that we’ve fallen behind in documenting its usage and utility but we’re working on it. We’d also appreciate your feedback.
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung DITA, DITA OT, dita topics, ditamaps, Proprietary DTP Software, User Documentation
Updated SOPERA SOA Tutorial
If you’ve been following our blog posts, you’ll have read the Helios is Out post, dated 28th June 2010. We mentioned in that blog post to all users that in order to access the tutorial all you had to was simply download the Eclipse SOA package and from the Eclipse IDE GUI menu, select Help > SOA > Install New Tutorials. For those of you who did download and install it, we mentioned in the Eclipse Help, SOPERA SOA Tutorial: Rent a Car Example (accessible via the Eclipse Help in the IDE) that we’d be collecting your feedback in order to improve the quality of the tutorial. We’ve done the following:
- Tested the use case scenario in the tutorial
- Streamlined the content
- Added screencasts
Installing the Updated SOPERA SOA Tutorial
To install the tutorial, uninstall the existing version and install the update, start the Eclipse IDE:
- Click Help > About Eclipse > Installation Details.
- From the ensuing list, select SOPERA SOA Tutorial: Rent a Car (OSGi) and click the uninstall button.
- Next, click Help > SOA > Install New Tutorials. This opens a new window: SOPERA SOA Tutorial Discovery.
- In the SOA Tutorial Discovery window, check the option SOPERA SOA Tutorial: Rent a Car (OSGi) and click Finish.
You’re all set! We hope you enjoy the tutorial. Please send us your feedback via the SOPERA Forum.
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung