Quickly develop printed technical documentation with DITA

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an OASIS XML language designed to manage product and user assistance documentation using a topic based architecture. A DITA topic based information architecture can greatly reduce content duplication, improve consistency, slash translation costs and facilitate automatic production of just the right content in the right format for the needs of each user group.

Print publishing solutions based on the DITA Open Toolkit and on XSL based applications are extraordinarily difficult to customize to your specific requirements and to maintain on an ongoing basis. A very high level of XSLT and XSL-FO expertise is required to make even simple changes to the DITA Open Toolkit style sheets. It can be a formidable exercise to plan and make all needed changes so your print application produces precisely the outputs you expect. It is also difficult to maintain and adapt style sheets to meet changing requirements after the initial development.

Elkera is dedicated to solving these problems. XML Print for DITA makes it easier than ever for documentation managers to quickly adapt the included style sheets into tailored print publishing applications without needing to learn new programming languages. Elkera XML Print for DITA also enables documentation designers to quickly modify print layouts to meet changing customer needs.

Elkera XML Print fully supports the DITA architecture. It includes foundation style sheets that provide all the common features required to produce product and user manuals plus article style documents. Most changes to those style sheets can be made using the visual styles design features of Elkera XML Print in Microsoft Word. Documentation managers can use existing skills to quickly adapt the foundation style sheets into tailored print publishing applications with minimal effort and expense.

Elkera XML Print for DITA slashes development effort and makes it easier than ever for documentation managers to produce high quality printed product and user documentation from topic based DITA content.

Enforce consistent styles and branding

Traditional word processor documentation is a disaster in many corporate environments. Many authors regard themselves as amateur desktop publishers with the freedom to control document appearance. The free-form nature of word processor document creation wastes vast amounts of time and reduces the effectiveness of written communication. In almost all enterprise contexts, documentation should be consistently presented using well designed standard styles to promote a consistent corporate image and facilitate effective communication. Enterprise content writers should be able to create content and never have to concern themselves with document presentation.

Elkera XML Print is a key element in solving this problem with structured content. All documentation can be generated automatically using standard layouts for each type of document. Generated documentation can be edited in a word processor, if necessary.

Elkera XML Print enables enterprises to store high volumes of structured content to reduce content maintenance costs. Valuable document content can be maintained indefinitely and used to automatically generate high quality print ready documents. Authors should not need to waste time on unproductive document formatting that is inconsistent and unreliable.

Elkera XML Print reduces the cost of creating standard documentation from enterprise content. It removes the inconsistencies and manual processes involved in conventional word processor based document production.

Automate document production

Many enterprises need to create large numbers of documents from stored precedents or templates. Traditionally, these documents are stored in word processor formats and copied to create new working documents. This is common for business proposals, legal documents and for correspondence and product documentation in financial services industries.

Maintenance of precedent and template documents in word processing formats creates many costs and disadvantages. Every time document layouts must be changed, even in minor ways, every document in the database must be edited. This is a costly and completely unnecessary burden associated with word processor based content.

Often, it is desired to store content chunks in clause libraries that can be re-used in multiple documents. It is very difficult to re-use word processing content in different documents or contexts because of the embedded styling information. If this styling is not correct for the target use, someone has to manually adjust the formatting. This is time consuming, error prone and costly.

Elkera XML Print is designed to automatically generate large volumes of print ready documents from structured XML content or Word template documents. It enables enterprises to manage precedent and template content to avoid the costs and unreliability of word processing formats without imposing change on content writers.

Organizations that produce large volumes of documents from templates can overcome the performance problems of batch processing in Word. Elkera XML Print provides exceptional performance for automated document production.