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DITA Authoring

DITA is an XML standard, an architectural approach, and a writing methodology, developed by technical communicators for technical communicators. It provides a standardised architectural framework for a common structure for content that promotes the consistent creation, sharing, and re-use of content.

Some of the benefits of using DITA include the following:
  • Flexibility - DITA is a topic-based architecture and it offers flexibility in content organization.
  • Modularity - DITA allows for content reuse that saves time and reduces the number of modifications.
  • Structured Authoring - DITA offers a standardized, methodological approach that helps to reduce authoring time and improve consistency.
  • Single-Source Publishing - DITA provides the ability to change content in one place and have the change propagate everywhere.
  • Multiple Output Formats - DITA supports multiple types of output.
  • Inheritance - The DITA inheritance model makes it easy to specialize topics or elements within topics and you only have to define how the element is different from its immediate ancestor.
  • Process Automation - DITA offers various ways to automate processes, such as with index or glossary production, output delivery, validation, and more.
  • Specialization - DITA allows you to define your own information types and semantic elements/attributes to suit the needs of your particular content model.
  • Multi-Lingual - DITA is a translation-friendly structure that supports numerous languages and text encodings.
  • Conditional Profiling - DITA supports conditional text processing and profiling to filter content in the publishing stage.

This chapter is designed to be a guide to help content authors who use DITA. It also presents the Oxygen XML Author Eclipse plugin features that are specific to working with DITA documents and concepts.

DITA Resources

For more information and technical details about working with DITA, refer to the following resources: