Key Concept Archive

For more information about how our library science background (and our love of all things metadata) guides the way we catalog information, see the Techcomm and Arbortext Resources page.

Same mess, different tools – Liz Fraley on the Content Content Podcast

b Post Summary In her interview, Liz Fraley talks in detail about the history of structured authoring and how her opinions have changed over 17 years in the technical writing industry. Last month I had the opportunity to talk with Ed Marsh of the Content Content podcast. I’ve known Ed…

Arbortext Editor for Authoring: So Easy A Child Can Do It

Arbortext Monster Garage, Season 3: Arbortext TC Dojo, Special S1 One of the hardest things for technical communicators moving into an XML authoring environment is that you’re learning two things at once: A new UI and a new technology. In this session, we’re going to take a step back and…

5 Tips for keeping your content flexible

Whether you’re translating or not, some practices can make it easier for you to future-proof your content. There are five basic tips that localization experts agree on: Tip #1: Use numbers for your call-outs and have a legend table. There are two benefits to this “old school” method. If you…

How do authors find content for reuse?

Your customers can find content, but can your content creation team? DITA content explodes. How do you manage it? A lot of customers have been asking us recently about how they’re going to manage content that explodes into lots and lots of little topics and content fragments. Authors wonder if…

Podcast Posted: Interview with Barry Schaeffer

This month’s interview is with a legend in the industry: Barry Schaeffer. Anyone who’s been in the SGML/XML industry for any length of time knows Barry Schaeffer. Barry is a frequent speaker and contributor on subjects related to information and content management. His work with structured information began in 1979…

What characteristics do you need in an XML publishing system?

I took a trip through the wayback machine and found an old article that had been published on Arbortext.com. Reading through it, I found a lot of key points that are still very relevant today. No single product is for every situation, but these guidelines are generally good advice. We…

Common Questions: Change Markup

This week’s topic: Change Tracking & Change Markup Change markup has historically been something that you had to implement yourself in XML publishing. Arbortext supports typical change markup behavior in the standard document types, and with a small amount of configuration for custom doctypes. All of the standard change markup…

Common Questions: Bursting

This week’s topic: Bursting We start talking about something we call “bursting” when we get questions like the following: Can a writer or translator work just on paragraph chunks while an editor can see entire sections? This question is nearly always followed by this question: Can this level of granularity be…