Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25516
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25516
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm pretty sure that the answer at the technical level is no. But this is really a question that needs to be addressed another level up.

The thing about structured writing is that it factors out certain aspects of the final publication, which then have to be factored back in by algorithms when it comes time to publish. The reason for factoring these things out is so that you can apply different algorithms to produce different kinds of outputs.

Different structured writing systems factor out different elements of a publication, and thus support different types of algorithms for producing different types of content.

The thing is, for the algorithms to work reliably, the writers have to get the structures correct. An editor with a fixed format like Word, FrameMaker, of Flare bakes the structures of those languages, and their representation, into the GUI. The GUI is based on the structures of those languages, and it will not fit other languages that have different structures.

DocBook and DITA, therefore, require different interfaces that expose their structures to the writer. Adopting a different language means adopting a different interface.

That said, DITA and DocBook are big complicated languages. You can build interfaces for them that only support a small portion of the structures that the full languages support. These may be easier to use, but they don't support all the features of the language. You can think of these interfaces as being related to DITA and DocBook the way MarkDown is related to HTML. Markdown is much easier to write than HTML, but it does not support more than a fraction of the HTML language.

Almost any writing formats in existence can be converted to DocBook. The result will be a valid DocBook document, but it won't take advantage of all the features of DocBook. Converting other formats to DITA is harder because of the topic architecture. But even where it works and produces a valid DITA file, it will not take advantage of all the features of DITA. Flare content could probably be converted to either DocBook or DITA, but the content would only contain those structures that are supported by the Flare interface. You would not get the full capability of Flare or DITA.

The point is, both DITA and DocBook support creating content structures that can be manipulates with a range of algorithms. But if your tool does not support the creation of the structures that those algorithms require, you won't be able to run them successfully, even if your source file is technically in DITA or DocBook.

In other words, you have to work back from the algorithms you want to run on your content. The algorithms you want to run require certain content structures to run reliably. So you have to choose a language that supports those structures, and then you have to choose a tool that lets authors create those structures clearly and easily.

If the tool you are using now does not support the algorithms you want to run, chances are it will not support the creation of the structures you need to run those algorithms. You need a tool that fits the format that supports the algorithms you want to run.

Original score: 1