Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture — Arbortext Edition picks up where the original edition of Introduction to DITA leaves off. As DITA becomes further entrenched as an ever more popular XML solution to topic-based authoring, a number of XML editors are available to assist content creators. This user guide is designed to provide its readers with a task-oriented approach to learning the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). In this edition, we introduce you to PTC’s Arbortext Editor. You will find conceptual overviews, background information, tutorials, and the sample XML markup you need to get started using DITA. You learn to use DITA at the same time you learn to apply the Arbortext Editor to authoring, conditional processing, and publishing. Here are some of the questions we help you answer:

• How do I create DITA topics?
• How do I assemble DITA topics into DITA maps for output?
• How do I do conditional processing with DITA?
• How do I create my own specializations?
• How do I use the DITA Open Toolkit?

Review of Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture

“All the great content from the original edition is there, but many illustrations are now screenshots from Arbortext Editor. Instead of the XML markup code for examples, you see the tags-on view in Arbortext Editor.

A new section (Lesson 1) describes context sensitive editing. Allowable elements that can be inserted depend on the location of your insertion point in the DITA document. Element entry automatically adds the appropriate start and end tags. You see the Document Map (structure view) and Edit View.

Lesson 9 introduces the Arbortext Map Editor, with its Resource Manager to locate topic files and a Relationship Tables visual editing interface.

Lesson 21 covers Arbortext's powerful Profiling approach to conditional processing.

The extensive coverage of the DITA Open Toolkit is gone, as publishing is now done with XSL in Styler (Lessons 22 to 25).

As I said in my review of the original edition, "this book has a strange metaphysical quality of being about itself. You are reading a line that describes the steps in a task and you suddenly realize that the very same steps were needed to generate the printed words you are looking at! It's a self-referential reference book. This book is not just about DITA. It is DITA. Talk about practicing what you preach...". Everyone starting out with DITA should read this book.”

Bob Doyle
Editor in Chief, CMS Review

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