DITA or Docbook = online vs printed documentation?

[France Baril <Barilf -at- ixiasoft -dot- com>]

I am migrating some documentation from Word to xml. The main goal of this
project is single sourcing. The second one is to offer very efficient search
capabilities by indexing the online documentation.

So far, I have managed to produce documents using SGML FrameMaker and the
docbook DTD. I find the docbook DTD works pretty well for printed documents,
although I would be tempted to add new elements. The major problem I
encountered is that it is hard to split documents into independant topics
for online presentation. Docbook is too linear.

I found that working with DITA can help me solve this linearity problem. It
seems very well adapted to the electronic format. However, as I keep all my
topics in seperate files, in order to use some of them (like copyright or
technical support information) in many books, I loose track of organisation
and how these topics come together in books, chapters and sections in the
printed documents. I also loose track of how concepts and tasks come
together.

My solution so far is to add some structural elements (book, chapter,
section) to DITA in order to produce printed documentation. These elements
would not contain any text, they would only refer to the proper files. The
book files will refer to the chapters entities, the chapter entities to the
proper section entities, which in turn will refer to the proper topic
entities. These elements will be used in printed documentation and dropped
in online documentation. I am still trying to find a way to use these
elements to dynamically create hyperlinks between related concepts and
tasks, but this will probably be done by the web application using
information from the dropped elements..

My questions are:

If anyone has tried something similar, how did it work?
Do you have alternative solutions?
What tools do you use for printed documention, anything better than
FrameMaker?

Thanks in advance for your help,

France Baril
Rédactrice Technique / Technical Writer 
IXIASOFT 
(514) 279-4942 
france -dot- baril -at- ixiasoft -dot- com



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