DocTrain East Conference currently taking place
by CharJT | October 31, 2008 in Conferences, Help Authoring Tools | 1 Comment
Technical communicators and Help authors from across the country gathered at the DocTrain East Conference in Burlington, MA, this week for sessions on DITA, simplified English, APIs and SDKs, along with tool presentations by the vendors.
The major tool announcement this week was MadCap’s DITA roadmap. Phase 1, due out in Q1 2009, will let users import and export DITA XML files. Phases 2 and 3 add more functionality, including support for the DITA schema. MadCap’s DITA support lets technical communicators create DITA XML files but saves them from having to use the DITA Toolkit to publish (transform) the output.
Author-it Software Corporation will release Author-it 5.2 in December, with support for structured authoring and DITA 1.1. Author-it was the first authoring tool to support DITA by means of custom topic templates that published DITA XML files.
Adobe demonstrated some of the new features in Acrobat 9 and, while very little could be announced, expect to see the next version of RoboHelp sometime around Q2 2009.
And with more DITA news, Robert Anderson from IBM said that DITA 1.2 is currently in review and should also be available during Q2 2009.
For more information (and to see the slide decks from the presentations), visit the DocTrain East 2008 website.
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