Benefits of Adopting DITA – DITA is a widely used term in the technical writing field, but it is not new. DITA is basically an XML-based standard for authoring and publishing structured content. In this article, we will learn about DITA and its benefits.
Content reusability and single-sourcing
Using DITA, you can adopt the topic-based authoring style. In this authoring style, you write content in a small chunk rather than in a linear structure. Each topic will have two important parts: the topic title and the topic body.
The topic body only contains content around the topic title. For example, if your topic title is DITA, then the content that you write for this particular topic must revolve around DITA. Another important thing in topic-based writing is that every topic must be independent, and they can be used as a single unit.
You can use a single topic multiple times for different documents and outputs. For example, if you create a topic titled “Overview”. In this topic, you have written an overview of my product. You can use this single “Overview” topic in multiple technical documentation, like the user manual, administrator manual, API documentation, installation guide, upgrade guide, etc. This is called single sourcing, and DITA provides a single sourcing advantage.
Easier and cheaper translation
Until now, we understood that we could take advantage of single-sourcing with DITA. Similarly, DITA can also help us to save a lot of money and effort that we are supposed to spend on the localization process of technical content.
Let me explain it deeper with the above example, now our requirement is to localize the contents of each technical document that we took in the above example. If you translate each document individually, you are reworking the Overview topic for each document, as is common in the documents. Instead of that, in single sourcing, you translate this topic at one time and call it for multiple documents, which saves your time and expenses compared to doing reworks.
Ensure content formatting
While using DITA for multiple publish outputs, you don’t need to give extra attention to the formatting of separate outputs of your technical document. DITA cares for the formatting of your technical documentation in multiple published outputs, which allows you to focus merely on content development and strategy.
DITA supports multiple publish output formats, such as PDF, HTML, Markdown, MS Word, and so on. Your reader will get the right formatting every time, without constraints on the output formats. It is important because the same content is not used for the same purpose and format by different audiences.
Well-Structure content
DITA-XML provides well-structured content that is ideal for maintaining large projects. You can quickly customise the structure’s contents for reuse. Hence, they are also very fast and efficient for publication.
Easily customisable structure
You can easily customize the existing content’s structure for your new project to meet specific requirements. DITA provides the ability to quickly and efficiently customize your content to meet specific project or workflow requirements. This advantage of DITA helps deliver concise and quality documents across an organisation.
For example, the company can define a DITA-XML schema that includes specific elements and attributes. As a technical writes, you can use this schema for creating technical documents. In the same way, other teams like marketing, pre-sales, and developers can also use the same schema. This practice ensures consistency throughout an organisation’s documents, which is important for developing thrust towards a brand.
Tools and plug-ins
Using DITA, you can access the built-in tools and configure the external tools, even AI-based tools can be used. For example, the Oxygen XML editor has introduced the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant, which helps you generate, rewrite, research, and analysis technical content.