An XML Experiment Fizzles

Monday, April 20th, 2009 | RoboHelp / Flare, Technical Communication

I did an experiment on Friday that taught me an important lesson: When it comes to handling XML structures, I know pretty much jack.

This may be a fatal admission for a technical communicator, but it’s an honest one.

After the STC Intermountain Chapter professional development meeting on Thursday, I decided with my procedures manual project to see if I could author in RoboHelp 7 and get the content easily into InDesign.

You may think at this point that I’m not just ignorant, I’m an ignorant crackpot.

I tried a couple of ideas, and you may be able to imagine how they turned out.

Idea 1: RH to Word to XML to InDesign

This one was a bust because despite Word 2007′s being based on XML, I couldn’t find an easy way to create a basic XML output from a Word document I created from RH7. I probably need to know more about XML schemas and such before I can do something like that.

Idea 2: RH to XML to InDesign

One of the options for RH7′s XML single source layout is to output the topics to DocBook XML. I tried this out even though I’m not familiar with the DocBook structure. When I imported the content of one of the resulting XML files into InDesign, the XML structure pane looked like a mess, and when I moved the content onto a page and matched styles to tags, I didn’t get much change visually.

The topic of the development meeting was doing documentation in an Agile development environment, and one of the panelists said that he thinks XML and DITA are perfect for an Agile environment because you author in chunks and topics and then create whatever output is needed at a given point in the process. That got me thinking that even if I’m doing a help system and a user guide that aren’t the same, I can still author all in one tool like I’m trying to do in RH for this project.

But in these experiments I learned not only that I need to learn more about XML structuring, but also that RH7 doesn’t do much in the way of XML. It’s uncertain at this point if RH8 is in my future. If I do get a license, one of the first things I’ll have to do is try this experiment over and see if the XML output goes more cleanly into InDesign. I’d be willing to take the extra step to get my content over into InDesign for formatting there.

Share This