Book your place on our new training course – DITA authoring with oXygen Author

19-21 May, Sutton, Surrey

This brand new course gives experienced and novice DITA authors everything they need to work with the oXygen Author XML authoring tool.

The course is divided into two parts – an introduction to DITA (1 day) and an introduction to oXygen XML (2 days). You can attend part one, part two or both together depending on your needs and prior DITA experience.

If you are new to DITA, day 1 of the course gives you a thorough overview of the DITA standard. The introductory part of the course is designed to give the solid theoretical foundation and practical understanding you need to begin working with DITA. The course teaches the theoretical principles of both XML and DITA, and how these principles are applied in documentation projects. It provides the foundation knowledge for working with DITA authoring, publishing and content management software tools.

Days 2 and 3 of the course teach you how to use oXygen Author effectively to author DITA content. You will learn how to:

  • Navigate the oXygen Author workspace menus, views and toolbars
  • Create and edit a topic in each of the base DITA information types using oXygen Author
  • Create and edit a ditamap and a bookmap using oXygen Author
  • Use cross-references in oXygen Author
  • Create simple and CALS tables in oXygen Author
  • Insert figures, images and multimedia into DITA topics using oXygen Author
  • Use conref and conkeyref features to transclude content in DITA topics using oXygen Author
  • Create at least three different output documents from a ditamap using tranformations scenarios in oXygen Author
  • Create a relationship table using oXygen Author, and explain the resultant links in the output
  • Create and manage a project in oXygen Author

Course developer — Dr. Tony Self

The course has been developed by Dr. Tony Self with the full support of Syncro Soft. Tony is recognised as one of the pioneers of hypertext and online documents. He has been involved in documentation and training for his entire career of 30 years. Over the past 20 of those years, Tony has worked specifically in the areas of online help systems, computer-based training, and electronic documents.

In addition to consulting, Tony is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology. He is the author of The DITA Style Guide, a Fellow of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communication UK (ISTC), and holds a PhD in semantic markup languages, a Graduate Diploma in Technical Communication, and a Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Trainer — Rachel Johnston

Rachel Johnston is a consultant and trainer for Mekon, helping businesses to understand what structured authoring in general, and DITA specifically can do for them.

As a former technical writer with over ten years’ experience she’s still close to the profession and understands the challenges facing documentation teams. She regularly works with authors on the ground to understand the change management, workflow and training needs involved in the move to structured authoring and this understanding is carried through into the classroom.

Please contact or call +44 (0)208 722 8400 for more information.