Topic
DITA XML can shrink the volume a technical writer creates, translates, and maintains: and a firewall vendor once got its documentation praised by the press because of it. But the productivity comes with a complexity bill. Here’s where structured authoring earns its keep, and where it’s overkill.
events.yaml holds no labels. traduction.yaml holds no facts. The generator resolves them at build time with --lang fr, --lang en, or --lang es. What enforcing this constraint looks like in practice, and why the discipline is worth the friction it creates.
A 370-cell calendar that shifts every year. A lead’s name in three places. An IBAN in an invisible text box. These are not unusual InDesign problems — they are what InDesign files become when they accumulate facts with no single home. Two projects show what the alternative looks like — and where InDesign’s own global tools stop short.
