JustSystems announced XMetaL Author Enterprise for Documentum Webtop now supports Documentum ECM 6.5 and Windows Vista, and has new usability features and quality enhancements. XMetaL Author Enterprise for Documentum Webtop is designed for full-time content creators who require a desktop authoring application supported by the Documentum content repository features including seamless search, link management and navigation capabilities. The latest enhancements include: Documentum ECM 6.5 support – Now supports Documentum ECM 6.5 SP1 and continues to support Documentum ECM 6 SP1; Windows Vista compatibility – Now compatible with Windows Vista in addition to continued compatibility with Windows XP.; New operations – From the docbase tree-view in XMetaL Author Enterprise for Documentum Webtop, users can now create new folders or documents-from-a-template, or initiate import operations by simply right-clicking on the item in the docbase tree-view; Quality enhancements – Now offers improved DITA authoring, with quality enhancements to file check-in operations, reusable component creation, and DITA operations. The latest version of XMetaL Author Enterprise for Documentum Webtop is available today. http://www.justsystems.com
Category: Content creation and design (Page 59 of 70)
Technologies and strategies for authoring and editing, including word processors, structured editors, web and page layout and formatting, content conversion and migration, multichannel content, structured and unstructured data integration, and metadata creation.
Robert D Anderson from IBM, Chief Architect of the DITA Open Toolkit, writes:
Hello,
This note is to announce that after some time off, the Boston area DITA
Users Group will be starting up again in 2009. To get things started, we
have created a new group Yahoo, so that we will be in sync with and
searchable by users of the many other Yahoo DITA lists. If you are
interested in joining the DITA Boston Users Group, please visit this page
for sign-up info.
We will soon be sending a survey to that list with proposed meeting topics,
so please sign up in order to help us decide what to feature. We will also
be looking for companies willing to host a meeting; if you already know you
are interested in hosting, please join the group and send a note to
ditabug-owner (which will go to me as well as to Liz Augustine and Lee Anne
Kowalski).
I always took footnotes for granted. You need them as you’re writing, you insert an indicator at the right place and it points the reader to an amplification, a citation, an off-hand comment, or something — but it’s out of the way, a distraction to the point you’re trying to make.
Some documents don’t need them, but some require them (e.g., scholarly documents, legal documents). In those documents, the footnotes contain such important information that, as Barry Bealer suggests in When footnotes are the content, “the meat [is] in the footnotes.”
The web doesn’t make it easy to represent footnotes. Footnotes on the Web argues that HTML is barely up to the task of presenting footnotes in any effective form.
But if you were to recreate the whole thing from scratch, without static paper as a model, how would you model footnotes?
In a document, a footnote is composed of two pieces of related information. One is the point that you’re trying to make, typically a new point. The other is some pre-existing reference material that presumably supports your point. If it is always the new material that points at the existing, supporting material, then we’re building an information taxonomy bottom up — with the unfortunate property that entering at higher levels will prevent us from seeing lower levels through explicitly-stated links.
To be fair, there are good reasons for connections to be bidirectional. Unidirectional links are forgivable for the paper model, with its inherently temporal life. But the WWW is more malleable, and bidirectional links don’t have to be published at the same time as the first end of the link. In this sense, HTML’s linking mechanism, the ‘<a href=”over_there”>’ construct is fundamentally broken. Google’s founders exploited just this characteristic of the web to build their company on a solution to a problem that needn’t have been.
And people who have lived through the markup revolution from the days of SGML and HyTime know that it shouldn’t have been.
But footnotes still only point bottom up. Fifteen to twenty years on, many of the deeper concepts of the markup revolution are still waiting to flower.
DocZone.com announced the release of DocZone DITA, a new Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for creating, managing and publishing DITA content. The new DocZone DITA product is integrated with JustSystems’ DITA authoring tool, XMetaL Author Enterprise, component content management (built as a layered application onto the Alfresco open source CMS), workflow, and single-source publishing to the DITA Open Toolkit. DocZone DITA is bundled with full support for DITA features such as conref and DITA maps, so that it is ready to use “out of the box”. DocZone.com and JustSystems announced a new partnership where the companies will work together to enable businesses to leverage the value of DITA. Under the terms of the partnership agreement, DocZone.com is an authorized worldwide reseller of JustSystems’ DITA authoring tool, XMetaL Author Enterprise. http://www.doczone.com/
MadCap Software announced its roadmap for supporting the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard. With MadCap, authors will have a complete authoring and publishing suite of tools for creating, managing, translating and publishing DITA content. The products will use MadCap’s XML editor, which provides an graphical user interface for creating featured documentation that hides the XML being generated below. In the first phase of its DITA initiative, MadCap Software will add DITA support to four products: MadCap Flare, MadCap Blaze, MadCap Analyzer for reporting, MadCap Lingo. With MadCap Flare and Blaze, authors will be able to import DITA projects and topics as raw XML content, and using the XML editor, change the style sheets to get the desired look and structure. Authors will then have the option to publish the output as DITA content; print formats, such as Microsoft Word, DOCX and XPS or Adobe FrameMaker, PDF and AIR; and a range of HTML and XHTML online formats MadCap Analyzer will work directly with DITA topics and projects to allow authors to analyze and report on the content. Similarly, MadCap Lingo will import data directly from DITA topics and projects, so that it can be translated. The translated material can be published as DITA content or exported to a Flare or Blaze project. In the second phase, MadCap will enable authors to natively create and edit DITA topics in Flare and Blaze, as well as MadCap X-Edit, MadCap’s software family for creating short documents, contributing content to other documents, and reviewing content. Like Flare and Blaze, X-Edit will also support the ability to import and publish DITA information. In the third phase, MadCap will add DITA support to its forthcoming MadCap Team Server. This will make it possible to manage and share DITA content across teams and projects, as well as schedule DITA publishing. http://www.madcapsoftware.com
MadCap Software announced the launch of MadCap Capture 3.0. Capture is MadCap’s screen capture and graphics editing software, which is designed specifically to address the needs of documentation professionals. With version 3.0, Capture adds several enhancements to provide image integration, quality, and control, including: Image text single-sourcing – Capture 3.0 expands on the integration with MadCap Flare, MadCap’s authoring software, which enables single-sourcing of content across the two applications. Now authors can enter a text description (screen tip or alternative text) for an image in a centralized location, so every time the image appears in a Flare project, the text automatically appears with it; System clipboard integration – Authors can now automatically save and insert screen captures into any application with direct system clipboard integration. Optimized size configuration for print and online publishing – Capture 3.0 allows authors to establish separate height and width settings for print and online publishing; Delayed capture – Capture 3.0 provides a time delay feature that lets you automatically capture an image after a certain number of seconds. This makes it possible to take screenshots showing elements such as drop-down menus and tool tips; Image blurring and magnification – In addition to being able to blur images around shapes, authors can now blur the area within shapes; Enhanced XPS support – Capture 3.0 provides the ability to save and load images in Microsoft XPS, providing a crisp image that does not become pixilated when someone zooms in. http://www.madcapsoftware.com/
Mary has blogged about our series of webinars with JustSystems on “Developing a Strategic Roadmap for Structured Content.”
Today’s first webinar provides an in-depth review of widely-adopted best practices for structured content, with a goal of enabling the attendees to become prepared to conduct a self-assessment of their own structured content practices. Today’s webinar also unveils the interactive ROI blueprint for structured content that we developed in conjunction with JustSystems.
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
