DITA Document Types Overview
The DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard was pioneered at IBM and is sponsored by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. OASIS defines DITA as “an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains based on existing types and domains.” The
Arbortext support for the standard is described in
DITA Standard Support.
There are two distinct types of DITA documents, topics and maps. In addition to the DITA topic and map types, Arbortext also supports the DITA Ditabase document type. DITA Ditabase documents are used to collect different types of DITA topics into a single document. Unlike a DITA map, which contains references to DITA topics, a DITA Ditabase contains the topics themselves. This enables you to combine a variety of DITA content into a single document. However, using a DITA map to create collections of topics is the preferred method.
Arbortext supports all of the DITA topic and map types distributed by OASIS. However, only the most common types are listed in the New Document dialog box.
All of the DITA document types include both DTD and XML Schema versions. The document types includes the following additional components:
• A template document
• A sample document
• A document type configuration (.dcf) file
• An Arbortext Styler stylesheet (.style) file for multiple outputs
• A sample profiling configuration (.pcf) file
The .style and .pcf files are shared across multiple DITA document types, so you will not find those files in each document type directory. Instead, the location of those files is configured in the document type’s .dcf file.
Note that Arbortext expects the xml:lang attribute to be set on the root element of DITA documents. When a new document is created from a template, the xml:lang attribute will be automatically set to a default value on the root tag. This behavior is controlled by the ditanewfilelang advanced preference.
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You can use distributed document types as examples for customizing your own document types. You should never alter the schema or DTD of any of the distributed document types directly. If you want to customize a distributed document type, make a copy of it and make changes to the copied version.
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You can use the DITA document types provided with Arbortext Editor as a basis for developing your own specializations. The document types are located in the Arbortext-path\doctypes\dita directory. Refer to the readme.txt file in that directory for a full description of the DITA document type directories. The OASIS version of the DITA document types is available in the Arbortext-path\doctypes\dita\oasis directory.
