Sunday, January 6, 2008
Demented
I'm a reasonably intelligent person. There are some things I can understand on a conceptual level that I cannot make work on the concrete level, and vise verse. My coordination is great, unless I'm thinking about it. The day I put my lawn mower together was a magnificent day. As far as I was concerned, I'd climbed Mount Olympus and won a wrestling match with Hercules all in one fell swoop. My vocabulary is pretty good, but there are days when polysyllabic explanations leave me muddled and frustrated; being frustrated muddles me even more. Then, when I find out that there is a perfectly good, simple explanation for the concept, I stomp. I get pissed when I'm outsmarted by words. It drives me nuts.
I'm working on two, related, projects right now. In one, I'm learning how to use XSL to play with XML documents. When I see the solutions, I can see, exactly, how it works, but I can't get there on my own. My second project involves DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) and there are three types of conversations about DITA that all revolve around how to do something with the structure of DITA. Some of the conversation is easy, authoring issues - some of the conversations are technical, dealing with XSL or the rendering engines - some are just beyond me and I have no idea what they're talking about. My three buckets. One I can follow, and often get ideas from, one that I can peer vaguely into and get the gist of, one I am left wondering just what the writer is saying and what they're saying it about.
I would sigh, in fact I did, but that is not something that really works in this medium.
If the medium is the message, I'm wondering what I'm missing. The whole idea of simplicity, in this case I'm exchanging my reader-facing simplicity for my creator-facing simplicity. I'm balancing a huge technical weight hoping that I will be delivering, to my reader, a clear, focused result. Something that will make their experience simpler.
I just wish it didn't leave me feeling like I've just jumped off a bridge because someone else told me it would be a good idea.
I'm working on two, related, projects right now. In one, I'm learning how to use XSL to play with XML documents. When I see the solutions, I can see, exactly, how it works, but I can't get there on my own. My second project involves DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) and there are three types of conversations about DITA that all revolve around how to do something with the structure of DITA. Some of the conversation is easy, authoring issues - some of the conversations are technical, dealing with XSL or the rendering engines - some are just beyond me and I have no idea what they're talking about. My three buckets. One I can follow, and often get ideas from, one that I can peer vaguely into and get the gist of, one I am left wondering just what the writer is saying and what they're saying it about.
I would sigh, in fact I did, but that is not something that really works in this medium.
If the medium is the message, I'm wondering what I'm missing. The whole idea of simplicity, in this case I'm exchanging my reader-facing simplicity for my creator-facing simplicity. I'm balancing a huge technical weight hoping that I will be delivering, to my reader, a clear, focused result. Something that will make their experience simpler.
I just wish it didn't leave me feeling like I've just jumped off a bridge because someone else told me it would be a good idea.
Labels: authoring, dita, hapless, XSL
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Quality in Manuals
One of the things that was keeping me awake last night (I really should have just come downstairs and worked it through then, instead of waiting all this time...) is the idea of measuring quality in documentation. Mentally reviewing the judging sheets from yesterday's competition, I starting thinking about the combination of those elements and DITA authoring.
One of the most serious, for us, drawbacks of the transition to DITA is the loss of our call-outs in our images. Since we translate content into a couple of dozen languages, the call-outs have to be accessible to the translators. The cost of having translators, or graphics specialists, recreate embedded call-outs is ridiculous and cancels out the prospective savings that the topic-level management, inherent in DITA, promises. There are some possible solutions out there, but for our skill level, they're not ready for prime time. There's that issue with XSLT again.
Indexing, in XMetal at least, is easier for me than in other products where the contents of the index entries are invisible. What I miss is the ability to collate the index markers (like Ixgen) and edit them en masse, as it were. I expect that in another 5 years DITA tools will be as full-featured as most DTP packages are now. As with all tools and methods, there are trade-offs.
Learning XML, whether it's DITA or not, shows me how integrated presentation and content had become. With fine-tuned tools, the presentation aspect does not take up the bulk of time. At work, we have processes in place that have meant that I've been able to concentrate on content. We have iron-clad templates that are maintained and sustained in concert with our translation company. Those rules mean that our output is consistent, worry-free, and fast. Drop a document into the output engine, for online help or Portable Document Format (PDF) and come back later to pick up the final output file.
The difference is, we could see what our output would look like before we dropped it into the black box (well, black box to the writers, but we have in-house experts who knew how to manipulate the processing); our editors could ensure that our style rules about widow and orphan content were handled in the source files. But, with DITA, we drop our content into the black box and we all stand around anxiously awaiting the result. None of us know how to make the processing work. None of us know how to tweak a paragraph or table to ensure the formatting is beautiful in the output. This has probably been the most frustrating part of our transition.
So much for judging by presentation.
Well, instead of muttering on about this I should be doing my XSL homework.
One of the most serious, for us, drawbacks of the transition to DITA is the loss of our call-outs in our images. Since we translate content into a couple of dozen languages, the call-outs have to be accessible to the translators. The cost of having translators, or graphics specialists, recreate embedded call-outs is ridiculous and cancels out the prospective savings that the topic-level management, inherent in DITA, promises. There are some possible solutions out there, but for our skill level, they're not ready for prime time. There's that issue with XSLT again.
Indexing, in XMetal at least, is easier for me than in other products where the contents of the index entries are invisible. What I miss is the ability to collate the index markers (like Ixgen) and edit them en masse, as it were. I expect that in another 5 years DITA tools will be as full-featured as most DTP packages are now. As with all tools and methods, there are trade-offs.
Learning XML, whether it's DITA or not, shows me how integrated presentation and content had become. With fine-tuned tools, the presentation aspect does not take up the bulk of time. At work, we have processes in place that have meant that I've been able to concentrate on content. We have iron-clad templates that are maintained and sustained in concert with our translation company. Those rules mean that our output is consistent, worry-free, and fast. Drop a document into the output engine, for online help or Portable Document Format (PDF) and come back later to pick up the final output file.
The difference is, we could see what our output would look like before we dropped it into the black box (well, black box to the writers, but we have in-house experts who knew how to manipulate the processing); our editors could ensure that our style rules about widow and orphan content were handled in the source files. But, with DITA, we drop our content into the black box and we all stand around anxiously awaiting the result. None of us know how to make the processing work. None of us know how to tweak a paragraph or table to ensure the formatting is beautiful in the output. This has probably been the most frustrating part of our transition.
So much for judging by presentation.
Well, instead of muttering on about this I should be doing my XSL homework.
Labels: dita, formatting, indexing, processing output, XSL
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