The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a popular XML-based architecture for authoring technical documentation.
DITA encourages writing of content as modular topics. Content is devided into small, self-contained topics that can be reused in different deliverables and single-sourced in a variety of ways. This approach is opposed to writing long "book-oriented" files such as Docbook. DITA topic-oriented approach emphasizes modularity and reuse of topics as concise units of information. Also, fragments of content within topics can be reused.
All editions of Serna support DITA. However, DITA usability tools (DITA dialogs available through the DITA menu and the DITA toolbar), which facilitate the insertion of common DITA constructs, and reference navigation are available in Serna Enterprise Edition only. Download a free trial of Serna Enterprise at http://www.syntext.com/downloads/serna/.
Figure 1. DITA document opened in Serna.
Although Serna supports both versions of DITA, DITA 1.0 is obsolescent . We recommend that you create DITA 1.1 documents.
Operations with DITA documents
Create DITA documents out-of-the-box
DITA 1.0 and DITA 1.1 documents can easily be created in Serna by means of ready-made document templates.
Open DITA documents with a single click
Serna lets you open documents with a single click thanks to document templates that associate all necessary metadata with a certain document type.
Serna has document templates for both DITA 1.0 and DITA 1.1 documents. However, all DITA documents are opened by default as DITA 1.1 documents.
Publish DITA documents to HTML and PDF
DITA documents can be published to HTML and PDF format. Publishing to PDF can be done with FOP out-of-the-box.
Referencing is an effective means of content reuse in DITA. Content reuse is available at different levels (elements, topics, maps) by means of different types of references.
Serna validates references.
In DITA, the uniqueness of ID attributes within a specific scope is essential for making references.
DITA IDs are ID attributes of non-topic elements. Unlike IDs of topic elements, which must be unique within the scope of the whole document, DITA IDs must be unique within the scope of the parent topic or map. DITA IDs are specially treated in Serna.
When you work with DITA documents, Serna maintains the uniqueness of DITA elements' IDs and reports duplicate DITA IDs.
You can use DITA custom content to quickly insert the most common DITA content portions. DITA custom content differs from Docbook custom content.
Learn about supported image formats and placement of images in DITA documents.
Some XML content is inadvisable in DITA.