DITA comes of age

SDL has released Trisoft 2011 for DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), the XML standard for technical writing. SDL says the new release of its Component Content Management software, Trisoft, extends SDL’s leadership position by offering support for the important new DITA 1.2 standard, currently in beta and on track for release by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee in 2010.

With DITA 1.2 support, SDL Trisoft can now be used out of the box with the DITA Learning and Training specialization, the new task model and the machine-industry specialization. Users can also take advantage of powerful new ways of managing content variations and achieving reuse with DITA 1.2’s new capabilities of "keyref", "conkeyref", "conref push" and "conref ranges".

In addition to supporting the DITA 1.2 standard, Trisoft 2011 offers new authoring and publishing capabilities designed to significantly enhance the user experience. Users of the SDL Trisoft Web client will experience an entirely new look and feel, making writers’ online experience more enjoyable and efficient, claims SDL. Authors will also benefit from a new search architecture that gives them the ability to search for information faster and with more granular precision. The new search includes the ability to search and find content inside XML elements and attributes, variables and conditions and to identify precisely the context in which content resides.

SDL further believes lead authors will appreciate enhanced capabilities offered in the Publication Manager, engineered to save time developing content and releasing product publications. The new capabilities include the ability to save a new version of an open publication, to check in/out from the Browse Repository dialog, to find most recently used items, to save output formats in the next version of a publication, to see an InContext Preview of Content, to add additional fields to the Baseline tab and to autocomplete items that are added when building a publication.