A biochemical company's extensive database of product specifications and pricing information provides the highly structured content for printed catalogs. Working with the company's DBA and the publishing system contractor, we defined an intermediate XML data structure optimized for efficient print production. A combination of SQL queries and XSLT transforms that we developed extract the relational data and feed it directly to the publishing system to produce several complex (and heavy) catalogs.

A reference publisher needed to consolidate several publication types, using different document structures. We conducted a comprehensive analysis and defined a single document structure that would support all of the document content, including the editorial and publishing processes.

Once the document types were consolidated into one, nearly ten thousand documents needed to be converted to conform with the new structure. We created conversion scripts to automate this process, auditing the content for completeness and validating the structure, resulting in 100% conversion without manual intervention.

How does a multi-national financial services firm ensure its new multi-language, custom-document system can meet both known and unknown requirements, without embarking on an expensive multi-year study?

We were engaged to develop a rapid prototype of a DITA authoring environment that modeled some initial concepts. We participated in discovery sessions to help identify additional requirements and bring everything into focus. In some cases, we modified the DITA specializations and related authoring configuration during these meetings. This quick definition of requirements resulted in a functional implementation much earlier than would otherwise have been possible.

For a small, resource-constrained tech writing department of a manufacturing company, we were tasked with developing a minimal, and maintainable, DITA authoring and publishing environment. The company already had authoring and content-management software in place, and needed this new content to fit within the existing workflows.

Since the client chose to avoid specializations, we customized the XMetaL user interface to improve guidance to authors and to reduce structural inconsistencies. In lieu of the popular but sometimes frustrating DITA Open Toolkit, we developed a single script that produces XSL-FO for print production, and also reformats the XML for integration with existing web-based and DVD-ROM deliverables. A key dimension of the script is the way in which we made much of the formatting accessible to team members with no knowledge of XSL-FO.

A manufacturer doing business with the United States Department of Defense was required to deliver technical documentation in SGML conforming to MIL-STD-2361. The collection of Interleaf source files was formatted for page production, with little regard to document structure. The formatting was to be mapped to the 900 elements of MIL-STD-2361 document type. The conversion script that we developed preserves all content and tracks context information, while identifying implicit structure from the embedded formatting information. The result of the script is an SGML document that is valid according to the MIL-STD-2361 DTD.

We designed and implemented a complete modular publishing architecture for a manufacturer's technical documentation. The main components (authoring, storage, document assembly, and formatting) guided the selection of products for the initial implementation and resulted in immediate efficiencies in production processes.

The architecture was tested when the client's preferred content management vendor could no longer service the account. We then integrated a new CMS without changing the underlying architecture, and continued operations with minimal disruption. Since that time, we've added support for another editing tool and a completely new formatting engine.