Hi, I'm a tech writer and a new user of DITA. My company says that I can use any DITA editor I want and will buy me an editor (such as Arbortext) if I so choose. I'm wondering whether any of you have any feedback to give me on Arbortext vs. other DITA editors for creating on-line or Web-based Help. I know that JoAnn Hackos promotes the use of Arbortext, given that her new book on DITA uses Arbortext examples throughout.

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I am trying to install the FrameMaker Adapter for the DITA Open Toolkit. I was able to add the DITA-OT application to the structapps.fm file in my FrameMaker 8 installation, but when I tried to generate sample FrameMaker output (step 1.3 in the framemake_adapter_adapter0.8\FrameMaker_adapter\ReadMe.html file) with this command:

ant -Dargs.input="samples\sequence.ditamap" dita2fmxml

I received this message:

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What is a good short description for a task?

Some of the short descriptions indicated as "good" in the class assignments simply restated information that was in the short description of the related concept. The task's short description may have been written differently and in the imperative, but it was redundant information.

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Materials:

• Review the presentation at http://www.ditausers.org/tutorials/basics/Priestley_Authoring/
• Read section 3.1 of the DITA 1.1 architectural specification:
  http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CS01/archspec/archspec.html
• Read the description of <shortdesc> in the DITA 1.1 language specification:
  http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CS01/langspec/langref/shortdesc.html

Assignment:

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I am trying to use a .ditaval file to display conditional text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<val>
<prop att="audience" val="user" action="exclude"/>
</val>

In my topic, I have an element defined thusly:

<p audience="user">Only display this text for admin users</p>

When I do my build in debug mode, it seems to resolve ant.input.valfile correctly:

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