In episode 68 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate talk about unusual outputs from DITA sources.
” With DITA, it’s incredibly flexible. We can generate almost any type of output that we want to with it.”
—Simon Bate

Related links:

* DITA to InDesign: getting your paragraph styles in order 
* DITA to InDesign: the gruesome details 
* Strange bedfellows: InDesign and DITA 

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @simonbate

Transcript:
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about unusual outputs from DITA sources. Hello and welcome come to the podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Simon Bate:     And I’m Simon Bate.
GK:     Today, we’re going to take a look at some different outputs from DITA that aren’t very common or widely used. I think the best place to kick off here is to talk about what is commonly used. What are the sort of more typical outputs that you see from those sources?
SB:     Yeah. We can actually divide this into two areas. One is the output formats and then the other is the output type itself. Among the usual DITA outputs, we have things like manuals, guides, essentially anything that’s paged. We’re predominantly talking about PDFs. Then there’s other outputs, which are more collections of HTML pages, whether it be websites or whatever. Then there are the formats themselves. Of course, the two groups that I’ve listed here, there’s a PDF output and HTML output.
GK:     Those are ones that are kind of delivered standard with the DITA open toolkit. One thing that we see a lot at Scriptorium is companies that ask us to come in and build customized versions of these outputs for their DITA content. We’ve had a lot of companies that want one or both of these output types and sometimes multiple versions. They might have one PDF transform that handles their manuals. They might have one that handles their data sheets or some other smaller file type, and then they might have HTML for all of their content as well so that they can deliver everything across the board in different ways.
SB:     Data sheets themselves are an interesting jumping off point for a discussion about unusual outputs because while I consider manuals and guides to be fairly standard output, data sheets often are an odd duck. Often you have a mapping where you have one DITA topic equals one data sheet. That’s not necessarily true, but that’s what we see a lot of the time. But data sheets because of the density of the information that’s in it require often a specialization or a lot of output class usage and with that comes a great deal of author training or buy in. Anybody writing a DITA topic that’s going to be converted to a data sheet has to know right from the start that that is one of the… The data sheet is a possible output for this content.
GK:     Absolutely. I think, like you said, that is a good jumping off point into talking about some more unusual or not so typical outputs that you might get from your DITA sources. I want to start off that discussion by talking about some of the benefits of these less typical outputs. What might make a company say, okay, we’ve got a real case here to go from DITA to something a little bit more unusu...