🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Marie...

FM8 will let you create and author DITA files, as well as create PDFs from DITA files. If you want to generate online Help, you'll need to use another tool for this purpose. This tool could be the DITA Open Toolkit (free), or it could be RoboHelp or WebWorks (or another tool that converts FM, MIF, or DITA files into online Help). You'll want to determine what type of online Help you plan to create in order to decide which tool is best for you. If you want to create an online output that is available through RoboHelp, you should consider buying the Technical Communication Suite (http://www.adobe.com/products/technicalcommunicationsuite/).

You can install a free plugin from Adobe that links FM8 to the DITA-OT which can be used to generate many types of online Help .. the main drawback to the OT is that it requires a fair amount of configuration and setup, which (unless you've got in-house XSLT developers) may cost a fair amount of money. You can get output from the OT fairly easily, but it's probably not going to look like something that you'd ship to your end users. It is definitely worth becoming familiar with the OT, since this has the most flexibility of all of the available tools.

You don't *need* a CMS, but if you have a large amount of (or very complex) documentation, it may be very helpful. Because DITA is a topic-oriented data model, the "standard" approach is to have one file per topic, which can easily turn a nice manageable set of 15 chapters into 500 or more topics. Managing the topic files can become overwhelming if things aren't carefully thought out ahead of time. As an interim approach, I often recommend that people start with nested topics as chapter files .. this is perfectly valid DITA, but can be easier to manage. As you get more familiar with DITA, you can move to the one-file-per-topic approach if that seems appropriate.

If you've currently got FrameMaker 7.1 or 7.2, you can download DITA-FMx and start messing with DITA in FrameMaker before moving to FM8. DITA-FMx is also available for FM8 and provides numerous authoring enhancements over the default features in FM8.

 <http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/>

Cheers and good luck in your research!

...scott

Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com