DITA for Technical Writing

We have seen the importance of documentation and different ways for effective documentation in the previous blog.

What is DITA?

DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

When I first came across the term DITA, it sounded complex. So, I started analyzing its meaning of each word.

Darwin — I read about a scientist named Charles Darwin in my school, in Biology, who is known as the father of evolution. He discovered the theory of Inheritance.

Information — Facts or details about something.

Typing — Process of writing or inputting text.

Architecture — Designing, building, or structuring.

Hence, I got the idea that DITA must be something that deals with structuring content in the form of inheritance.

It is exactly that!

Is DITA a tool? What exactly is it?

DITA is a standard. It is not a tool (usually confused). We use the standard of DITA for creating effective documents.

An XML editor is a markup language editor with added functionality to facilitate the editing of XML. An example of an XML editor is Oxygen.

A Content Management System (CMS) is software for managing the documentation development lifecycle, including the processes of creating, updating, publishing, and translating information. An example of CMS is Ixiasoft. In this blog, we will explore the concept of DITA in association with the Ixiasoft CMS and Oxygen editor.

We use the CMS, XML editor, and the concept of DITA to build the documents.

Hence, we hear terms like “DITA-XML” and “DITA-CMS”.

What is XML?

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. DITA is an XML-based standard.

Let us understand the concept of XML and inheritance using an example of a company. A company has employees. Each employee has attributes like Name, Email ID, and country. The country further has attributes like state, city, and pin code. Let us see how this information can be represented both as an XML tree and in XML code:

XML Inheritance tree:

XML Code:

This is how the content is structured in XML based authoring. The content is written using various pre-defined tags. Following are some of the tags:

1. <p></p> : Encloses a paragraph.

2. <ol></ol>: Encloses ordered lists.

3. <ul></ul>: Encloses unordered lists.

4. <li></li>: Encloses list items.

5. <codeph></codeph>: Encloses a line of code.

6. <codeblock></codeblock>: Encloses a block of code.

7. <note></note>: Encloses notes.

8. <table></table>: Encloses tables.

9. <option></option> : Encloses options.

We have seen how the content is written in DITA. To write content, we must first create a new document/file.

Topics in DITA

In DITA, a group of information is called topic. Based on the type of content present within a topic, the topic is categorized into three types: concept topic, task topic, and reference topic.

We now know about different types of topics.

Since we are authoring the content using topics, we call this type of authoring topic-based Authoring.

Let’s say that we are organizing these topics into a book format. The book contains chapters and chapters that contain topics. Similarly, the DITA topics are organized into maps and book maps.

Maps and Bookmaps

Maps and bookmaps are used to organize and compile topics and other content into larger units. They specify the sequence and hierarchy of topics, other maps, and non-DITA resources, such as PDF files.

Maps and bookmaps define the online navigation or table of contents for a deliverable, and they establish the relationships or links among topics they reference. These links are called cross-references.

What are cross-references and how can we create them?

References to other content within the same publication use the <xref> tag to create an active link to the referenced content. There are 3 ways of referencing the content based on the level of reference.

Once the topics are created, placed into chapters and books, the books are now organized into a library. The library in Ixiasoft CMS is called a DRM library. DRM stands for Dynamic Release Management.

What is a DRM?

In Ixiasoft, a DRM library is a collection of objects that can be shared between different DRM products or other DRM libraries.

A DRM provides the ability to group content in branches (DRM versions) that belong to a DRM product or DRM library.

As we saw how this type of authoring has a structure, we call this type of authoring structured authoring.

Output

The content can be published in PDF, XML, or HTML format.