DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is a new XML format that is getting lots of attention these days. It was specifically designed for topic-oriented authoring and supports efficient reuse of content. Aside from its sensible and easy-to-understand data model, a big reason for its high adoption rate is the availability of the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT). The DITA-OT (free and open source) provides samples and documentation, as well as XSL transformations that generate numerous types of online output, including HTML, CHM, JavaHelp, PDF, and others. Adopting an existing and well thought out data model that comes with the tools for getting output, can save you months (if not years) of development time.

Because DITA is an XML format, it can be authored in any XML editor. However, due to DITA's special reuse constructs, it works best to use an editor that is specially designed for DITA authoring. There are a number of editors that support DITA authoring, the popular ones being XMetaL, Arbortext, and FrameMaker. An advantage that FrameMaker has is its built-in support for high quality PDF output. The only alternative to Frame's PDF output is through XSL-FO, which for reasonably complex output is very expensive to develop and maintain, and XSL-FO can't match the quality of Frame-generated PDF.

In order to author DITA content in FrameMaker, you'll need version 8 or 7.2 (with limited support in 7.1). FrameMaker 8 provides basic support for DITA authoring, and the DITA-FMx plugin offers extended authoring features.

In this presentation you'll see the whole process of authoring and publishing DITA using FrameMaker 8. You'll see how to efficiently use DITA maps to generate different deliverables (books or online Help) that share common topics, in addition to using conrefs to reuse content within topics. You'll also see how quick and easy it is to generate various types of output using the DITA Open Toolkit as well as building a traditional "Frame" book and generating a PDF through FrameMaker.

For more information about DITA, please visit the DITA Knowledgebase at dita.xml.org .