Have you ever used the lorem() function in Microsoft Word? How about the rand() function? Do you know all the function keys? Most of us have used Microsoft Word for countless years and don’t know about all of the “hidden” functionality that it offers. Chances are, you’ll know a few of these, but you won’t know all of them simply because you’ve never needed them. Many of these functions are extremely powerful utilities that make Word a versatile application beyond a standard formatted text edi... Read Full Story

I wasn’t able to attend many of the session since I was manning the Flatirons Solution booth.  Yet from talking with the attendees who visited with us, here are some of the key takeaways: DITA is here to stay. This is not news, but the key point here is that organizations are adopting the standard in earnest, as evidenced by the 150-200 attendees who came despite a bad economy, and discretionary budgets being whittled to next to nothing.  This means that organizations are thinki... Read Full Story

I’ve been following James Sulak's Blog.  He has some pretty impressive detailed discussions about using XProc.  XProc is an XML pipeline processing language, specifically designed to provide instructions for processing XML content. The Recommendation specifies many different kinds of “steps” that can be assembled in virtually any order to control the sequencing and output from one step to another. Right now, DITA’s reference implementation, the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) uses Apache Ant... Read Full Story

I’ll be attending the conference in St. Petersburg, FL.  Come visit the Flatirons Solutions booth while you’re there.  It should be a very interesting conference.  Eric Severson, CTO of Flatirons Solutions will be presenting a potentially “game-changing” presentation that speaks to lowering the “barrier to entry” into XML authoring. I recommend seeing this one. Read Full Story

Scott Hudson, Dick Hamilton, Larry Rowland and I (AKA, “The Colorado DocBook Coalition”) recently drafted a proposal to support “modular” DocBook and presented it to the DocBook TC yesterday.  In general, this proposal is in response to huge demand for DITA-like capabilities for DocBook.  Many core business factors are driving DocBook in this direction: more distributed authoring: authors are responsible for specific content areas rather than whole manuals.  Content could be authored by m... Read Full Story

I attended a webinar yesterday hosted by Just Systems for their XMReviewer product.  The problem space is that conventional reviewing processes are cumbersome and inefficient, particularly when there are multiple reviewers that need to review a document concurrently.  In general, most review processes rely on either multiple draft copies being sent out, one to each reviewer, and then it’s up to the author to “merge” the comment feedback into the source. With XMReviewer, the entire r... Read Full Story

After reading a few blogs here and there, I’ve seen a few posts about Microsoft’s Live Writer for creating blog posts.  Always on the lookout for new toys and tools, I decided to download it and try it out. I gotta admit, I’m sold.  This is a pretty nice application that allows me to work offline to write and edit my posts and when I am ready and able to connect, I simply push the “Publish” button and away it goes.  Sweet. It’s simple to install, and simple to configure to poin... Read Full Story

With the economic hard times, a lot of proposed projects that would allow companies to leverage the real advantages of XML are being shelved until economic conditions improve.  Obviously, in my position, I would love to see more companies pushing to using XML throughout the enterprise. We’ve all heard of the advantages of XML: reuse, repurposing, distributed authoring, personalized content, and so on. These are underlying returns on investment for implementing an XML solution.  The ... Read Full Story

One of the cool things about Doxsl is that I can test it on itself.  Since Doxsl is an XSLT application (v2.0), I can create documentation using itself.  I'll be posting these on the Sourceforge project website soon - when I finish documenting my own code.  Hmmm... walking the talk and eating your own dogfood at the same time.There's something about reflexive tools that is just pretty cool.  I built another application to document the DocBook RelaxNG schemas into DocBook.  The Doxsl D... Read Full Story

I recently found a post by a former client of mine, James Sulak who had some very positive feedback for my open source project, DOXSL. Check out his post. Thanks for the shout out, James!On that front, I have been working on a new release. There are a few bugs I've discovered when I started processing some DITA stylesheets, particularly when trying to look for overrides using DITA's matching patterns (e.g., *[contains(@class,'- topic-type/element-name ')] - things got borked ... Read Full Story