STC Summit 2017

You've heard the buzz about structured authoring and DITA—how great it is for efficient content reuse, how it enforces consistency, how it guides our writing for topic-based presentations. But what if there's no budget for new tools, no time for training to "become a DITA writer," and no time to migrate legacy unstructured content? Don't despair! You can easily leverage many structured authoring best practices even when using unstructured tools. This session demonstrates tool-agnostic techniques such as writing a good short description, designing task-focused documents, and increasing content reuse. You'll also see how to use FrameMaker (unstructured), Word, and Flare features to style content semantically, standardize textual navigation aids, add metadata, and perform multi-channel publishing. Whether you're a DITA beginner, a structured authoring guru forced to use unstructured tools, or a strategist contemplating a legacy conversion project, you can immediately apply the techniques in this session to your daily work.