…Wait, there are alternatives to DITA for small companies?

I’m really excited to follow Tom Johnson’s upcoming series on structured authoring in DITA vs. Jekyll at http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/03/23/new-series-jekyll-versus-dita/.

When Tom first started writing about reusing static content with Jekyll ( http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/02/27/static-site-generators-start-to-displace-online-cmss/) he kind of blew my mind. I’d gotten the impression that for writers at small companies/startups, there weren’t any really good content reuse technologies out there. But the templates Tom authored looks super slick!

In fact those templates stand in stark contrast to my own experiences tinkering with the DITA-OT. A couple years ago, I spent a week, purely for my own edification, following this tutorial: DITA for solo writers.

It was a heroic effort on the author’s part, I must say! And after a bunch of effort, I did in fact manage to hack the DITA-OT with a small topic specialization and content reuse.

And what was my output? Minimally formatted PDFs (I felt lucky I got an output at all; fixing broken PDFs was a big issue), and seriously old-school HTML output:

and the PDF output:

(I wrote a recipes DITA specialization, because at the time I was really into perfecting my slow cooker skills).

Contrast that with the much-easier tutorial Tom posted, and the slick output: http://tomjohnson1492.github.io/documentation-theme-jekyll/ …OK, I know the compare is somewhat apples and oranges. But still–If I ever get a spare moment, I might just try out that tutorial!