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If you're starting from scratch, you don't have the expense of
migrating legacy docs, but even so, if you do a proper cost-benefit
analysis DITA will seldom if ever be the best choice for a one-person
shop, at least from the employer's perspective.
If you're single-sourcing, you're separating design from content. A
tool that gives you a WYSIWYG view of at least one of your
deliverables while editing is more efficient than one where you're
just looking at text and tags.
To minimize translation costs, the most important thing is to hire the
right translation service for your needs. Their translation memory
software will support a number of tools, and picking the best of those
will depend on a lot of factors.
DITA has no intrinsic advantage as far as topic reuse. Flare's hard to
beat on that score for a one-person shop.
Minimalism is about the writer, not the tool.
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 5:10 PM, kafkascampi <kafkascampi -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> About DITA and large companies--I am a lone writer and author all of our
> docs in DITA (well, some in Docbook). I'd argue that for a small company,
> the benefits of DITA are still quite valid: Separating design from content,
> easing translation costs, maximizing reusability, writing for minimalism.
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