Structured DITA XML format
Reduce production costs and delivery time in technical documentation by choosing the right format, structured authoring approach, and modular content reuse strategies.
Reducing production and translation costs, shortening time to market, and improving documentation quality. These are the challenges facing technical writers today. One of the best ways to achieve this is to reduce the source volume of documentation and better manage enterprise content.
Degrees of structuring
Section titled “Degrees of structuring”Documentation formats differ in their degree of structuring, from reStructuredTextA plain-text markup language from the Python ecosystem, richer than Markdown (directives, roles, cross-references), and the native source format of the Sphinx documentation generator.View in glossary → to DITA XMLA structured, modular XML authoring architecture built around the concept/task/reference typology and content reuse via conrefs and ditamaps.View in glossary →:
Technical documentation formats: degrees of structuring
Redundancy: useful to readers, costly in sources
Section titled “Redundancy: useful to readers, costly in sources”The information that technical writers provide to the public must be redundant: the company must present each of its audiences with all the information they need, in the medium that is appropriate for them. To take the simplest example, each information medium must include the company’s contact details. But up to 50% of the information disseminated by the company is repeated.
On the other hand, internal information redundancy generates additional costs, lengthens production cycles, and leads to a decrease in the consistency, and therefore the quality, of the content. It is therefore essential to reduce and better share source content and decrease its volume. The technical writer must divide the information into unique, standardized, and generic building blocks so that it can be assembled on demand. They must therefore use modules that are structured in a consistent manner and can be easily manipulated by applications.
Documentation sources must be less voluminous than deliverables
DITA XML: standardized building blocks
Section titled “DITA XML: standardized building blocks”DITA XML is a structured XML architecture for creating modular documents and reusing content. Using a common base of atomic DITA XML information modules, technical writers can provide all the information each user needs in real time, on any type of media, from e-learning to PDF or paper documents, to websites.
DITA XML applies the principle of non-redundancy of information specific to standardized databases. This architecture brings the revolution introduced in industry by standardization to technical documentation: just as different car models can be built from a set of identical parts, technical writers can publish different documents from a set of standardized information building blocks.