DITA for Publishers: Intelligent Content Starts Here

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DITA for Publishers

Intelligent Content 2012

Eliot Kimber

Senior Solutions Architect


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What Are Publishers?

Enterprises whose primary business is producing print or online content for human consumption

Types of Publishers: Fiction and Trade Books (novels, popular non-fiction)

Educational (textbooks, test prep, etc.)

Scientific, Technical, Medical (STM)

Journals

Reference (dictionaries and encyclopedias)

Magazines

Other

All share common business process challenges

Most use similar technology for authoring, production, and delivery


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Business Drivers for XML Use

Rise of digital publishing

Maximize value of content through reuse and repurposing

Better enable licensing of content

Automation of production Reduce cycle times

Reduce production costs

React quickly to new technology

Integrate interactive media (video, apps, etc.)

Management of large volume of content: what do I have and where is it?


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Why DITA Makes Sense for Publishers

DITA can be applied to any kind of document

DITA provides robust base vocabulary that can be safely and easily extended

Publishing content is simple, except where it isn’t

Publishing content is not modular, except where it is

Publishers have critical need for:

Re-use of content at various levels of granularity

Reliable interchange of content in XML form

Within organizations

With licensing partners

Flexible vocabulary

Ability to create new products quickly from existing content


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What Is DITA for Publishers?

Open-Source project

(dita4publishers.sourceforge.net)

Project goal:

Provide general-purpose DITA vocabulary and supporting

processing specific to Publishing documents and

business processes in order to lower the cost of using

XML as far as possible.

Current version as of Feb, 2012:

0.9.18

0.9.19 under development

Long-term intent is to make it a formal standard

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Why is DITA for Publishers?

DITA offers shortest, fastest route to high-value, extensible, sustainable XML solutions

DITA out-of-the-box optimized for tech docs, not Publishing documents

Publishers need basic and fairly obvious starting point

Need to support Publishing workflows:

Non-XML authoring (Word manuscripts)

InDesign for print production

EPUB, Kindle, and other digital formats

As a market, Publishing orders of magnitude larger than tech doc.

Publishing is a profit center, tech doc is a cost center


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What D4P Provides

DITA vocabulary modules for new topic types, map

types, and domains. These are packaged as Toolkit

plugins.

Extensions to HTML and PDF transforms to

support D4P vocabulary

Transformation types for EPUB, Kindle, “HTML 2”,

and, soon, HTML 5.

Word-to-DITA transformation framework

DITA-to-InDesign transformation framework


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D4P Topic Types

Reflect typical Publishing components:

Article, chapter, part, subsection, sidebar, division, cover

Are otherwise identical to generic <topic>

Reflect Publishers’ expectation that there will be

element types for chapters, articles, etc.

By default, D4P topic types may be nested without

restriction

For example, typical practice is to create each

chapter as a single XML document with nested

subsection topics within the root chapter topic.


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D4P Map Types and Domains

Two map domains:

Publication metadata:

Defines markup for publication metadata as required by

publishers. More complete and sophisticated than base DITA

publication metadata.

Publication map domain:

Provides large variety of topicref types reflecting different

parts of publications

Sample publication map: “pubmap”

Combines the publication metadata and publication map

domains.

Suitable for generic publications


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Topic Domain modules

Adds stuff Publishers need that’s not in base DITA Formatting domain: <br/>, <tab/>, <dropcap>, <smallcap>, etc.

Enumeration domains: capture literal numbers, generate numbers using author-defined rules

Math domain: represent equations as graphics or using MathML (TeX also a possibility but not yet implemented)

Publication content domain: epigraph, epigram, pull quotes, etc.

Verse domain: poetry and similar content

Textbook domain: structures unique to textbooks (display-map, etc.)

Rendition target attribute domain: conditional attribute for specifying the output target (PDF, EPUB, etc.)

Except for MathML, this is all stuff Tech Docs would never use or even sanction as sensible

All this stuff is essential for Publishing use cases


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Typical D4P Document


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Word-to-DITA transformation framework

Enables conversion of styled Word to DITA XML

XML configuration file maps Word styles to XML

elements

Can extend the base transform with XSLT as

needed

Can generate maps and topics from a single input

Word document if needed


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DITA-to-InDesign Transformation

Framework

Enables generating InDesign InCopy articles from DITA XML using XSLT

InCopy articles may be manually placed in InDesign documents by Designers

XML-to-InDesign style mapping defined by easy-to-modify XSLT module

Separate Java library for generating complete InDesign documents

Limited in how complete the InDesign document can be because there’s no feedback from InDesign

Typefi product provides much more complete solution where book designs are reasonably consistent


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DITA FOR PUBLISHERS IN

ACTION


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Japanese Literature

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Typical Trade Book


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Enhanced EPUB


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Linear Algebra Textbook


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InDesign From DITA


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DITA for Publishers Future

HTML 5 output with basic designs for Web and

tablet delivery

EPUB3 (once readers are available)

Improved DITA-to-PDF process (XSL-FO based)

Input into DITA 1.3 process (more highlight

elements, pubmap, etc.)

Pursue formal standardization

Continue to add vocabulary as requirements are

discovered


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Summary

Publishers need XML

XML means DITA

Publishers need DITA adapted to the needs of

Publishers

Thus DITA for Publishers

DITA for Publishers is an open-source project

Many parts are of course useful to all DITA users

(EPUB generation, enhanced HTML, etc.)


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Questions?

Contact: [email protected]

D4P Project: http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net

General D4P discussion: DITA Users Yahoo group

mailto:[email protected]

http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net

Technology

DITA for Publishers: Intelligent Content Starts Here