We designed and implemented a complete modular publishing architecture for a manufacturer's technical documentation. The main components (authoring, storage, document assembly, and formatting) guided the selection of products for the initial implementation and resulted in immediate efficiencies in production processes.

The architecture was tested when the client's preferred content management vendor could no longer service the account. We then integrated a new CMS without changing the underlying architecture, and continued operations with minimal disruption. Since that time, we've added support for another editing tool and a completely new formatting engine.

For a small, resource-constrained tech writing department of a manufacturing company, we were tasked with developing a minimal, and maintainable, DITA authoring and publishing environment. The company already had authoring and content-management software in place, and needed this new content to fit within the existing workflows.

Since the client chose to avoid specializations, we customized the XMetaL user interface to improve guidance to authors and to reduce structural inconsistencies. In lieu of the popular but sometimes frustrating DITA Open Toolkit, we developed a single script that produces XSL-FO for print production, and also reformats the XML for integration with existing web-based and DVD-ROM deliverables. A key dimension of the script is the way in which we made much of the formatting accessible to team members with no knowledge of XSL-FO.