General Catch up

There have been one or two developments associated with S1000D during the last couple of months. Some watchers of this Blog may not be aware of these so I thought that it would be a good idea to highlight some of them.

New/Amended Schemas for S1000D Issue 2 Change 2

Some updated/amended schemas for S1000D Issue 2 Change 2.1, designated Issue 2.2.1, are available on the website (follow this link to get directly to the download page). I hear that these changes were necessary after some problems were discovered by developers incorporating the original schemas into their applications.

I understand that 2.2.1 has rectified just about all the issues. The S1000D SGML DTD has not been affected by this update.

S1000D Issue 2.3 Delayed

The schema update from 2.2 to 2.2.1 was made all the more important following the announcement on 2nd October that the Issue Date of S1000D 2.3 (follow this link to get directly to the announcement page) has been put back from 2 October 2006 to 28 February 2007. To be honest I am not surprised because S1000D Issue 2.3 will be the first edition to have been produced from XML files (prior to this not even SGML was used). The company that I work for has an application that prints Data Modules hard copy/PDF publications in a way that produces documents looking and feeling very close to historical handbooks and with the PDF files having full hypertext linking between cross-references and REFDMs. I can vouch for the amount of development work required to handle this type of output with the level of options that we have. The other factor which I can vouch for is that generating PDF output which equates to several hundreds, even a thousand or so pages, is no click-and-view process - it can and does take several hours.

Keep up the good work people.

Preliminary Details about the S1000D Forum in 2007

Recently added to the Meetings and Events page on theS1000D Website is preliminary information about the 2007 S1000D Forum which is scheduled to take place inMelbourne, Australia 1 - 3 May 2007. It has a working title of Transition from Paper to Interactive. A PDF file can be downloaded which gives some essential but preliminary information about the event.