Editing legacy content

[Thomis]

Hello,

I apologize if this is a question that has already been over discussed. I have a DITA version of a book that is in need of a new edition. The problem is my author is not familiar with DITA or do they have a copy of oXygen or the wherewithal to learn a new piece of software. How can I obtain a usable (readable and electronically editable) copy of the text that can easily be used to update DITA legacy edition.

Thanks

[Radu]

Hi,

Usually the easiest way to review content would be to keep it in DITA and have the author use a tool which can display and edit DITA content (not necessarily Oxygen).

Otherwise you would have to publish the DITA content to some other format.
Some publish the DITA content to PDF and then reviewers use the capabilities of Adobe Reader to add comments to the PDF but probably in your case the author also wants to edit the content directly.
Or you could publish the DITA content to Open Document Format and have the author edit in Libre Office.
The problem with such approaches is that at some time you have to go back to DITA with content which has been modified by the author and I do not think this is going to be easy.

Honestly I would take my chances and have the author download a trial version of Oxygen and look at this simple video demonstration which shows DITA editing in Oxygen's visual Author mode:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/demo/DITA_Editing.html

Regards,
Radu