MadCap unveils DITA roadmap

MadCap [1], the documentation development and delivery tool company, has announced a roadmap to add Darwin Information Typing Architecture support to its products. The announcement came during the DocTrain East conference last week.

The DITA standard was originally developed by IBM and now is an OASIS XML standard for creating technical documentation. XML content management enables you to produce modular documentation where you can write once and use many times and because you are using XML, can programatically move content through a workflow system. Mike Hamilton, MadCap vice president of product management, spoke about how this approach could help companies produce documentation more efficiently.

“DITA holds incredible promise for facilitating data consistency and reuse, but for many companies, it remains far too unwieldy to implement. Documentation professionals have had to become XML experts, obtain help from developers, or rely on third-party toolkits, which often cannot fully automate the required transforms,” he said.

MadCap hopes its approach will simplify the use of XML and DITA in enterprise settings. In the first phase, users will be able to import DITA projects, edit them and publish as DITA content. Down the road, authors can use MadCap tools to generate native DITA content.

For more information:
- see the MadCap press release [2]

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