ITauthor

I get the feeling that ever since Adobe released the DITA application pack for FrameMaker 7, lots of people have been beavering away with it writing structure applications and  their own FrameMaker extensions,  and generally seeing how far they can go with DITA in FrameMaker. It's all a bit hacky - even though the functionality from the application pack is now built into FrameMaker 8.0. The trouble is that the application pack makes DITA possible, but it doesn't make it a realistic option for most folk because you still need to do a lot of work before you can actually get to the stage where you can hope to produce professional quality documentation with it. If you're like me you just don't have the time to dedicate to this. However, there are efforts to bring this to you and reduce the amount of setup work you need to do before you can start using DITA to produce documentation in FrameMaker. One such effort  is DITA-FMx. I haven't  tried it out yet, but you can download it for free from here:     http://www.leximation.com/dita-fmx/ Check out the  online help here: http://docs.leximation.com/dita-fmx/0.01/   It's probably worth a look, but I'm still kind of hanging on for Madcap to get their act together on DITA. Flare seems like an obvious tool to use with DITA, but it wasn't in the recently released DITA 3.0 and I haven't heard any firm plans for when it's going to get added. Adobe have stolen a march on Madcap here, but I suspect Madcap's DITA effort will be worth waiting for - so I'm holding back spending time doing DITA in FrameMaker until I see what Madcap come up with, or until I get fed up waiting.