Knowledge base articles

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the world, including the world of technical communication. Never has it been so easy to automatically create or edit text and images with the help of generative AI such as ChatGPT. What does this mean for the field of technical communication and the technical writing community? What are the opportunities and risks? more...

Do you write and publish technical documentation in DITA-XML? It sounds easy: At the click of a button, an XML authoring tool or a web application magically creates a PDF, HTML documentation or WebHelp. But is it really that simple? What happens under the hood? And what if you want to customize the output formats? The answer is the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT). more...

The beginning is decisive to the success of any project. This is why a kick-off meeting is always the first step in the common project planning path. It’s an opportunity for all project participants to get to know each other and discuss the following points. more...

There are several ways and tools you can use to create a PDF from a technical documentation in DITA-XML or a website in HTML. In the first part of this knowledge article, I look at the advantages and disadvantages of the languages commonly used in this process: XSL-FO and CSS Paged Media. In the second part I compare programs for rendering HTML files to PDF files via CSS and compare their functions.  more...

Imagine you can write and update technical documentation with the same tools as the software developers use for their source code: with the same text editor and in the same IDE (integrated development environment), as plain text and versioned in your favorite version control system. Sounds impossible? It is not: It is docs-as-code. more...