Last week at the WritersUA Conference in Portland, I chaired a "Developing Help with DITA" forum alongside Alan Houser, Matthew Ellison and Scott Prentice (all on the DITA Help Sub Committee). There was a lot of interest from delegates (the majority of whom are Help authors) in using DITA, although most are only 'testing the water'.

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Until a few weeks ago, I was unaware that there was a company employing some 200 technical writers just two kilometres from where I teach technical communication in Melbourne, Australia.  Likewise, a manager at the company was unaware that my university provided post-graduate education in technical communication. We were operating in two parallel universes. The company involved operates in the "engineering technical publications" field, which seems to be quite separate (and isolated) from the "IT and corporate technical communication" field.

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"Airplane Help" describes a technique whereby locally installed Help and server-based Help are integrated, so that a software application user is presented with server Help if he or she has an Internet connection, or local Help if not. The advantage of this approach is that the most current version of the Help is displayed if possible, but at least some form of Help is displayed when the user is "offline". Can DITA play a role in delivering Airplane Help?

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In earlier musings about full-text search, I wondered whether the lack of full-text search (FTS) in the standard DITA OT XHTML outputs was restrictive. Bob Doyle pointed out that Eclipse Help InfoCenters provide FTS, and that led to some further wonderings about the complexity of Eclipse Help installations. I've since noticed some DITA users have come up with some ingenius workarounds so that DITA content can be turned into beautiful "WebHelp" output just like that produced by HTML-based Help Authoring Tools.

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When I started as a technical writer, in the pre-PC days, most work was in what was called the engineering field. I mainly worked with aircraft manuals, but also with manuals relating to other engineering areas, such as buses, ships, and buildings. We produced hand-written manuscripts, which were typed, reviewed, typeset, laid out, reviewed, and finally printed.

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