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Back before inks were invented, engraving was the main form of writing. You formed a tablet out of clay and used a stick to impress something that looked like "<LI>" on the surface, and there you had it: primitive markup. Photography is a modern form of leaving a mark without ink, so today we are going to explore how to create a DITA document using a cell-phone camera as your XML editor.
Don Daymigration, editingFirst, find some printed page that you want to convert into DITA. I chose a type specimen book printed in 1810 by C. Norris & Co., Newburyport, Massachusetts on a Peter Smith Patent hand press. Other forms of historical engraving will probably work: intaglio and offset are good; lithographs and silkscreen not so much. I chose this text as a symbolic Rosetta Stone for this exercise. Set the camera for low resolution and take a picture:
Now get a copy of an OCR program. This post describes how to get a free demo version that does the job:Download ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Spring for Free.
Just open the OCR program and drag your uploaded photo onto the interface. If your karma is good, you should see something like this:
It is almost easy from here on. Just copy the recovered text into Microsoft Word, save as Filtered HTML, and run the h2d converter in DITA Open Toolkit (you get the hang of it after only a few hours of setting your Java classpath and finally typing the commands correctly). It's not every day that you can take a bunch of free tools and get a DITA result like this other example that I just tried of a journal entry by Caption John Smith from 1600 or so:
ph> Tlii Siege if OlnnipiKli; (in e&celieiU stratagem by Smith; another not much worse.Ari'Enthc lossc of Catiku. ilic V'j/i/iT.sivitIiiivputic thou-KUIlI lii'airjlf'l t!l' Mriin^ '['(mm-i>l' Ollllil/lti'.'lt -.0 -.Imi-rln-vi' i mir.'l.ll /',',! ,'C'V,' ll!'-''/., '[/l'-'l:'<. ..ml!',',: M.1' , ,.'u:!'i.....!Barrai SueO, General] >.i rii, \i-],],ik(- Vnilleiy, lie Udtriustii ill* (.^-iiiiiniir, his inmtiy Iricml. 'in'li II link1, lliiil he muikl i]iiucr,:ikc in iti.iki' III.K hiuiv. ;-in tliiti-; [n> intciid-cil, ;tti<[ liau- \:\~ ,I'I-IHT. lu.fld tin i- brine him inn to H>IIU>. LI!,in vih'fHii :iii"lit ninki'rtic fl;imc nf x '('i.jvh .['cue In t],i- T(.H,,I-; /uVf/ ii]f!,minl MJtli tin, Knu.fii; iiiK'nlio"; \,,,;;/, made i! so |-!:,iiL.'. ihm h.nliKlih li.r gav. l.i.nf.nidrsHlio in the dsiiki1 nc.n hA-j;i-]it iiim In a i>n......iiinc, wln-iv! !,lu lU'd thi( i' 'I'niTlii - ri|iur.r,i,.ui Ai,.n cllu i . u Lirli ji^milii'Hi'u!. ,,.n! ;M,~HUTC. anniin niiti llmv oiln r iin's in lih<th(,nSli iistant se ,"! 1.....l.'i.......h. I nill . h.ir-,. (.11 !',r I .1,1. ;it In Al;i 'mis,l[,.> you; Ete-sfto^ ansivtred liv v.unl,!. :i.,(hlis ius done First licviii liK !ni's^tM(. .is Iw, tk-ii diikU-il l!ii.< Al^lB.ljL-1 in (M
I was so impressed, I just had to show you on this first day of April. DITA doesn't have to be hard, we just make it that way if we can. As I say almost too often, "Use this knowledge with care!"
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About Don Day | Ranking among the top XML technology leaders today,Don Day not only contributes to the success o... |
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Contelligence Group LLC | Adding meaning and mobility to content™... |
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Content and Information Modeling | Applications that rely on structured data depend on a Data Model to ensure things work as planne... |
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Content Strategy | Combining two words with broad meanings usually guarantees confusion. Everyone is talking about , b... |
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Giving Back | Nonprofit organizations often face the same content challenges as do large businesses and government... |
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Contelligence Group | Welcome to the Contelligence Group! We are a consultancy, a technology incubator, a center for innov... |
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Case Study Highlight: IBM Microelectronics | Enabling semantic technical collaboration and publishing using familiar tools.... |
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Solutions | The Contelligence Group is driven to simplify complexity; whether it be in business processes, in so... |
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Technical Advisory Services | Until recently unstructured data received minimal attention and even large IT departments had little... |
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The Myth of the Bleeding Edge | Implementing executive strategy can require projects for which there are few precedents and definite... |
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The Holy Grail: Timely Adaptiveness for CIA Content! | In effect, dynamic (or "on demand") configuration for the audience and task (or "conditionality). ... |
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Services | We help organizations solve unstructured data problems and deliver content that operates with the sa... |
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expeDITA Shortcodes | Popular blogs provide authors with a set of pseudo-markup called that represent special function du... |
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Copyright © 2013 Contelligence Group, LLC
This site delivers live content to personalize the user experience and dynamic layouts to support all devices.