The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides a framework for any industry to develop their documentation. The idea of DITA is not only a technology that provides flexibility and cost savings, but a methodology to provide better user focused content. This workshop is to provide a brief overview of DITA and its benefits, as well as in depth, hands-on exercises working through the development of sample content. The workshop will end with a demonstration of how to display output using the DITA Open Toolkit.

Agenda

• 8:30 - 9:00 - Introductions and Goals - We will take some time in the beginning to understand each person’s goals for the workshop. This includes what projects they are working on, and what they hope to accomplish using DITA.
• 9:00 - 9:30 - Overview of DITA concepts and benefits - Before diving in to the DITA hands on experience, it helps to understand what DITA is. In this brief presentation, I will discuss concepts about topics, DITA maps and relationship tables, conditional processing, and production. We will also discuss the benefits that you can bring back to your management to encourage the change to use DITA.
• 9:30 - 11:30 - Authoring topics and creating a map - Let’s get the hands dirty. I will provide three sample topics in hard copy that you must author in DITA. Each topic will represent a different information type (task, concept, and reference) to get a full idea of what each looks like. For this exercise, you will need a computer and, on the computer, an XML editor. You can download trial versions of XML editors from the internet. The ones that would work best for this are Arbortext Editor, XMetaL, or oXygen. We will also learn how to create a DITA map to produce a hierarchical representation of your topics. We will follow a path through creation of a DITA content authoring the task first, then the concept, then the reference, and finally the DITA map.
• 11:30 - 12:00 - Demonstration of producing content through the DITA Open Toolkit - So how do you actually get to see what it looks like? I will do a short demonstration of the DITA Open toolkit using the example content provided for the previous exercises. This will not be a hands on part of the workshop due to different computer configurations.