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It is true that DITA already has, in the form of the freely available DITA Open Toolkit and associated open source Apache tools, a ready-made set of tools for generating outputs including PDF and HTML Help. What about authors who are already committed to DITA and are considering adopting Flare for the first time what can Flare 5 offer them? The answer is that Flare 5 provides a very powerful and flexible publishing engine. If existing Flare users do decide to create DITA-based content, then they will have to do so in a separate authoring tool such as PTC's Arbortext Editor or XMetaL Author Enterprise from JustSystems Flare's own editor is still restricted to working with XHTML-based content in version 5. Specialization, although a unique and very important feature of DITA, cannot be viewed as a benefit of adopting DITA from a Flare user's point of view, since Flare 5 does not yet officially support specialized content (although some early adopters of Flare 5 have apparently had success with it). Structured authoring also makes content easier to manage and re-purpose. Structured authoring is one of the key advantages that moving to DITA would bring, and it is particularly beneficial for large teams of authors where consistency of approach can be a key issue. However, Flare does not in itself yet provide a structured authoring environment so without DITA it is not possible to constrain authors to write specific types of topic to a particular outline or structure V for example, always to ensure that task topics contain at least one instructional step. One of the key questions is: if you are already a Flare user, is it worth you adopting DITA with the arrival of Flare 5? Or should you just continue using Flare's XHTML Editor for creating content? DITA's topic-based paradigm alone does not provide a compelling reason to embrace DITA since Flare is already topic-based itself, and enables topics to be re-used across multiple projects through the global project linking feature (introduced in Flare 4.0).
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Its unique support for "specialization", which enables it to be customised for specific domains and industry sectors while still maintaining the underlying structures.Its structured and semantic mark-up, which makes for increased consistency and more effective content management.
#Madcap support software#
Its topic-based paradigm, which makes information re-use easier and makes it a very suitable source format for software user assistance.The key features and benefits of DITA are: Since then, interest in DITA has grown rapidly and authoring tool support is now beginning to gain momentum. It originated within IBM in the early part of this decade, and was donated to the OASIS standards organization in 2004. DITA (which stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML-based end-to-end architecture for authoring and delivering technical information in a range of formats. Before we look at Flare's support for DITA in detail, let's just briefly review the main features and benefits of DITA itself.