DITA Orientation

Who should attend this course?

Anyone who wants to understand more about DITA.

Duration 1 day
Price Call for details
Location Mekon House, Sutton, London, SM1 1JN, UK, or at your premises.

Benefits

The course provides a comprehensive overview of how DITA works, its benefits, and the considerations and decisions that support a successful DITA implementation. It provides the foundation knowledge for working with DITA authoring, publishing and content management software tools.

It also helps drive a successful Information Architecture design and development process, because it helps inform the stakeholders in the fundamentals that DITA offers. This in turn helps the team understand the choices and design considerations being proposed by the IA specialist.

Included in this course

90 days email support from your trainer is included in the price of the course.

Length of course

1 day

Contact us for a quote

+44 (0)20 8722 8400 Enquiry form

Course outline

Introduction: the business problems

  • Why content is becoming more complex
  • How XML helps
  • XML architecture
  • Limitations of XML
  • DITA authoring tools, rendering tools & component content management systems.

Specific benefits of DITA

  • DITA as a response to XML limitations
  • Ease of implementation
  • Authoring efficiency
  • Portability & Extensibility

DITA Topics

  • DITA Topic Types: what they are and why they are useful
  • Anatomy of a topic
  • Considerations around topic-based authoring – how big should a topic be?

DITA Elements

  • Anatomy of an element
  • Two useful elements: <shortdesc> and <tm>

DITA Maps

  • Maps for context, organisation and navigation
  • Anatomy of a map
  • Submaps: maps as a reuse mechanism

Publishing

  • Overview of the DITA Open Toolkit
  • Considerations around publishing

Specialisation

  • Benefits of specialisation
  • Examples of a specialisation: DITA for Publishers
  • Constraints
  • Considerations around specialisation

Reuse and variability

  • Overview of DITA reuse – the ‘reuse toolbox’
  • Reuse via topics and maps
  • Reuse by reference – the @conref attribute
  • Considerations around @conref
  • Conditional filtering
  • Managing variables – @keyref and @conkeyref

DITA Metadata

  • What is metadata and why is it useful?
  • Different approaches to metadata
  • Applications of metadata – dynamic delivery

Managing DITA content

  • Considerations around content management
  • Typical content management functionality

Custom training

If you have specific training needs, we can tailor a course that suits your requirements. We have designed training courses for customers using DITA in a production environment to help them get the most out of DITA. A custom course is useful if you need to:

  • Help new team members learn DITA in the context of your particular content model
  • Improve reuse and authoring productivity
  • Promote good practice

Contact us for a no-commitment chat

Contact us for a quote

+44 (0)20 8722 8400 Enquiry form