atw: Re: XML software for Word-like formatting
- From: Stuart Burnfield <slb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Austechwriter <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 08:17:26 +0800 (WST)
I suggested Dave have a look at Author IT as it ticks most of these boxes,
though I was in two minds because it's been a while since I used it and I don't
know much about the XML side of it.
FWIW they've just announced a new release with more XML support:
"Author-it 5.3 includes (blah blah blah...), and the second phase
of our innovative structured authoring , adding more fine grained
control of topic structures and introducing book structures.
Author-it now offers you the most practical and easy-to-use
solution to implement structured authoring for any content model,
whether it is your own or a standard like DITA. The intuitive
content editor guides you through the entire process with
examples and requires no coding or XML knowledge."
Has anybody used Author IT with DITA and can say how well it works?
On the reviewing side, I'm using the shared review feature in Acrobat
(comment-enabled PDF on a server; multiple reviewers use Adobe Reader to add
comments, view each other's comments, etc.) and so far it works very well--much
better than I expected.
Stuart
Dave Gardiner said:
> I envisage having a XML platform that would let me edit like Word,
> and to be flexible in modifying how content is marked up as
> everyone's report is formatted differently. Software that lets
> me tag content on the fly would be great (drag and drop markup,
> where I can pick tag sets from a palette), and being able to
> split up and print documents by chapter/section/paragraph (I think
> some form of content management system might let me do this,
> in addition to an XML package, but I?m not sure what).
> Having the ability to 'turn off' images for display/print would
> be useful too.
>
> And then it would be useful for authors collaborating to have one
> document sitting on a FTP site while they make changes remotely.
> That?d get around the problem of lots of shuffling emails and
> files back and forth with each draft as happens with a Word
> document.
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