AODC 2010 report

I’ve written up a report on the 13th Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference, and posted it under ‘Resources’ in xmleditoz.net.au. Besides a PDF, I’ve included the DocBook 5 XML so you can see the original coding used to create the PDF (I wrote it in XML rather than Word).

This was a great conference – very small with around 30 attendees – but the variety and quality of material presented was astounding (and the occasional funny videos were great – have you ever seen Hitler discussing the iPad with his henchmen?). This really was authoring and publishing at the cutting edge, and I approached a few speakers about their experiences – particularly with developing XML training courses, scalable vector graphics (SVG), Author-it and Adobe FrameMaker. A discussion about collaborative authoring with Google Docs grabbed my interest, as I have (mis)handled a few big editing jobs (yes, I admit I could’ve done better) trying to keep track of different versions of documents – I am convinced there is a better way to edit multi-authored works, and that is with online authoring and editing apps.

As a generalist editor with no experience in technical communication, I tended to pay less attention to the various ‘Help’ authoring tools, but took in the concepts and practices. I have used only DocBook for XML editing, and I got the impression that the DITA schema is strongly advocated for technical authoring – so I will definitely look into DITA to see how it compares with DocBook for ease of use and functionality.

Three things I will do as a result of this conference:

• look at a range of online collaborative authoring tools and services, and invest in an easy-to-use package
• obtain two documents on DITA (DITA 101, DITA for Solo Writers) and start learning what types of publications it can be useful for
• research SVG as a format to replace current graphics formats (PNG, TIFF, GIF) for XML documents.
  

So, what is it with the pic of the croc above? I won it in a raffle for ‘newcomers’ to the conference (I'm certainly not implying that the conference was a croc).