Last night’s meeting was almost entirely devoted to discussing conditional filtering, with a few digressions into conrefs, content management systems, and the local taco carts. Melanie Jennings shared her detailed planning process for tagging and filtering a set of DITA files that will currently support six different filtered outputs for different audiences and platforms, but in the future may have to support many more. We also heard about how other PDX DITA members are using conditional filtering in different ways to get the most out of their files, and discussed some of the challenges of ditamap inheritance, enforcing consistent tagging, and, especially, educating all the writers in a group who need to understand not only the tagging model but how and to whom the final output will be delivered.

We were excited to have Toni Mantych join us for the first time. Toni teaches DITA over at Portland State and is planning to teach a DITA workshop in May through the local STC chapter. Stay tuned for more news about that workshop in a future post.

If you’d like to attend the next meeting in June, please check back here for the date or contact us to be added to the email list for reminders.