CIDM ConVEx | April 26-28, 2021, Virtual
CIDM and Stilo invite you to be a part of innovating the future as we announce ConVEx – a virtual experience for content developers: April 26-28, 2021.
ConVEx will air live across global time zones to give everyone, regardless of location, an opportunity to participate in this new learning experience. ConVEx is not an online simulation of an in-person conference, but an immersive experience designed from the ground up.
ConVEx has something for everyone, including sessions on:
• Collaboration
• Content Strategy
• DITA
• Management & Metrics
• Use Cases
• User Focus Strategy
Find more information and register online at https://convex.infomanagementcenter.com/.
WEBINAR | Downsides Of Poor DITA Conversions
Recorded on Wed, October 21, 2020
Our Presenter:
Helen St. Denis | Conversion Services Manager
Stilo and CIDM ComTech have partnered to bring you this webinar. Thinking of automating your entire conversion process to DITA? Wanting to handle conversion work manually, in-house?
Before you proceed, think about how the conversion could help you derive the benefits of DITA that you expect. A simplistic approach may allow you to publish something that looks just like what you have now. But a really good quality conversion will help you to leverage content reuse, personalization and multi-channel publishing, as well as making it easier to maintain and update your content. For example, will your conversion generate keys and keyrefs for variables? How about a relationship table, to prevent broken links? Will menu cascades be correctly marked up, for localization purposes?
Automatic, Exact Topic Deduplication (available in Migrate 4.0+)
Easy Automation
Migrate now identifies and eliminates redundant topics as part of the process of converting content to DITA.
You can put converted files into a collection and have the system compare each topic in the collection with the others. Migrate will identify exact-matches, select a canonical version, automatically eliminate redundant copies, and then update all topics & associated maps accordingly.
Quickly Deduplicate Topics
Use the power of automation to quickly detect & deduplicate exact-match DITA topics.
To learn more about Migrate, please visit the Migrate product page or the Users’ Guide.
Free Conversion Offer
Upload your sample document (20-30 pages) and we will convert it to DITA free of charge!
We review the conversion results with you, and let you retain the output for your own testing purposes.
How to Convert Multilingual Content To DITA XML
When Converting Multilingual Content, Follow These Steps:
- Prepare your multilingual input file in one of the following formats: FrameMaker®, MS Word, RoboHelp®, InDesign®, Flare, XML
- Upload the input file to Migrate
- Specify the DITA target
- Prepare a Migrate Rule set
- Convert your content to DITA XML
- Review your DITA using an XML editor
- Refine the DITA conversion by updating the rule set if necessary
Migrate can handle numerous language encoding schemes and is truly multilingual. It can support most written languages including Latin based and Asian languages.
Migrate can handle a large range of source formats including Word, FrameMaker, RoboHelp, DocBook, InDesign, Flare, and XML/SGML/HTML.
Moving an Annotation
Overview
Procedure
- In the displayed rules view, double click anywhere on the rule you want to update. This places the rule in edit mode.
- Right click on the annotation you would like to move. The annotation you selected will have a green background highlight.
- Move the annotation.
- Click Move up
- or Move down.
Result
The annotation has been moved.
Once You Are Done
Although the rule has been updated within the rules editor, the change has not yet been propagated to the portal. To commit the change to the portal, you must save the rule set.
Deleting an Annotation
Overview
Procedure
- In the displayed rules view, double click anywhere on the rule you want to update. This places the rule in edit mode.
- Right click on the annotation you would like to delete. The annotation you selected will have a green background highlight.
- Click Delete.
Result
The annotation has been removed from the rule.
Once You Are Done
Although the rule has been updated within the rules editor, the change has not yet been propagated to the portal. To commit the change to the portal, you must save the rule set.
Selecting Content Elements
Overview
Migrate breaks down your document into simple content elements. These are the content units on which you can set annotations which will guide the conversion to the target format.
Content elements may be nested. For example, a paragraph element may contain span elements. A table element will contain row elements which, in turn, may contain paragraph and span elements.
Example: Selecting Content Elements
Selecting a paragraph content element in a table
From the content panel, click the content element that you are interested in. The innermost content element you clicked on is selected and will now have a green background.
Selecting a row content element in a table
Click the currently selected content element. The selection will expand to include the containing content element, if any. If the current selection was already the outermost content element, the innermost content element at the point you clicked will be selected.
Note: Clicking anywhere in the green box from the previous fig will select the current row.
Selecting an entire table content element
Note: Clicking anywhere in the green box from the previous fig will select the entire table.
Determining Where a Rule Has Applied
Overview
A correct conversion depends on having annotations properly applied to content elements. This requires rule conditions to be accurately specified. The rules editor allows you to see where a rule has applied.
Procedure
- From the rules grid, select the rule that you are interested in.
Result
The content panel now shows a green box around all content element to which the selected rule has applied.
The rules grid contains a toolbar for stepping through the hits, taking you in turn to each content element to which the selected rule has applied.
Example: Determining Where a Rule has Applied
Applied Annotations
Overview
A correct conversion depends on having annotations properly applied to content elements. The rules editor allows you to check this.
Procedure
- From the content panel, select the content element that you are interested in.
Result
The Element Properties tab is automatically put into view and is updated to correspond with the content element you have selected.
The Annotations section lists the annotations which have applied to the selected content element.
Example: Element Properties
- The selected element in the content panel has a green background.
- The selected element’s properties are shown on the right.
