Controling the Authoring Experience

Question

We use DITA and Structured FrameMaker. We have a lot of casual authors who don't know DITA and rarely use it. We want to make the authoring experience less confusing for them. All the element and attirbute choices overwhelm them and there are no tooltips that explain each DITA element. Is there a way to customize the Structured Application so that casual DITA authors can write with less awareness of the DITA tags? We were thinking of something form-like. I was hoping that someone out there had approached this problem. Thanks for your ideas.
Paula

Answer 1

Hi Paula...
You can definitely trim down the elements and attributes that are exposed to your writers. You can't really make it into a true "form", but you can do alot to make it simpler for the casual author. This is one of the nice things about Frame .. you can modify the elements and attributes exposed to the writers without messing with the underlying DITA DTD files.
This is done by modifying the EDD that is included in the structure application's template file. You should start by "cloning" the default Topic structure application to make a DITA-Topic-Light (or whatever name you choose) app. You should not jump in and modify the default app. You *will* break it (even the most experienced app developers will break these things at some point), and you'll want to be able to compare your app to the default app.
I have some instructions for cloning structure apps. This is intended for use with DITA-FMx, but the general idea can be used for other apps as well.
    http://docs.leximation.com/dita-fmx/1.1/?ditafmx_cloningtapps.html
Once you've created a new structure application, you can start modifying the EDD. This is something that will take some time. You'll need to be very familiar with EDD syntax. The Structure Application Developer's Guide is your friend. Download it from here ..
    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/framemaker/onlinemanuals.html
EDD development is an iterative process. You make some tweaks, then test, then make more tweaks .. and so on. Plan on spending a fair amount of time, especially if this is all new to you.
When you modify the EDD, you can import it into an open document for testing. Just use the File > Import > Element Definitions command. When you're ready to actually include this in your application, you need to open the template file, and import the EDD into that.
If this is all a bit overwhelming, you might want to read the topic "Developing Custom Structure Applications" in the DITA-FMx help .. it gives an overview of the files and how they are related.
A side note .. DITA-FMx provides a feature that lets the writer select an element and press ALT+F1 .. this opens the official DITA Reference documentation on the topic that explains that element. From there you can see the possible parent elements as well as child elements. It also explains the attributes and what they are used for. (DITA-FMx also provides lots more features and enhancements for using DITA in Frame, see the feature comparison .. http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/featurecomparison.php)
If you don't want to use DITA-FMx but want to get this ALT+F1 functionality .. I have a free plugin called MyHelp that does this ..
    http://leximation.com/tools/info/myhelp.php
Anyway .. this is probably enough info for now.
Cheers,
...scott
Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com