(This post is part of the Learn DITA on Your Own series.)
Before you can create your first DITA project (the “World’s Smallest DITA Project”, which will be the content of my next post), you need to have a basic understanding of DITA. There are tons of articles on the topic, but many of them focus on the advantages of DITA, its business case, or the benefits of single-source documentation. That’s all well and good, but our objective here is to learn how to write documents using DITA. Therefore, let’s get started with the following article, written by Chris Benz:
This article provides a great overview of DITA and its main concepts. Note that it was written for instructional developers and trainers, so you can skip the introductory paragraphs, jump directly to “What is DITA?”, and stop reading at “What is the DITA L&TC Specialization?” (unless you’re an instructional developer, in which case you’ll find this section very interesting).
So now I’m going to assume that you’ve read the article and know some of the basic DITA concepts :)
Now you know enough to get started! In my next post, I’ll take you through the whole process of writing a topic, creating a map, and generating your output. You’ll create the “World’s Smallest DITA Project” and go through the following steps:
Coming next week: The World’s Smallest DITA Project.
For the more curious
It provides a very nice high-level crash course on the DITA language.