An overview of the DITA-Word user interface to topic oriented writing, as established by the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), is described to provide users a general understanding of where and how content is created, stored, organized and generally interacted with.
DITA-Word uses the idea that delivered content can be stored as separate content and aggregated by a map that describes a hierarchy and relationships between different types of information. DITA uses the concept of Information Type (info-type) to distinguish between the different kinds of content stored in data files. The info-type establishes the perspective that the information is designed to portray.
For example when a number of steps need to be described to perform a task; where the pre-requisite, examples and post-requisite may also need to be described; the “task” info-type would be used to store this content. In another example, the map info-type would be used to define the relationships between a set of content files so the structure of a deliverable (i.e. PDF, Word RFT, HTML Help, xhtml, and more) can be established. Content can be classified, structured and stored as a topic, concept, reference, task, or some other specialized info-type. The two fundamental info-types, DITA Map (ditamap) and DITA (dita) info-type files form two major branches of info-type classes.
DITA-Word groups content at the highest level by subject. This grouping is first established by storage location. Content and map files stored under the same subject file directory that has a name that is encoded from the subject name. DITA maps can be thought to establish a second type grouping where content and map files are aggregated by hierarchy or info-type relationship.
File names are maintained by DITA-Word as is the file system directory tree. For this reason the idea of saving a file to arbitrary locations with arbitrary names is replace by a convention where files are located by subject and info-type declarations. File names are determined by encoding the title of a map or content file. Map files are stored in the subject directory and content files are stored in sub-directory that correspond to there info-type.
The DITA Open Source Toolkit (DITA-OT) is an implementation of the DITA OASIS specification. This toolkit along with java, ant, and saxon from the backbone of applications, schema (xsd), DTDs, transforms (xsl) and xml build files that enable ditamap and dita files to become deliverables.
The details of this alphabet soup of xml technologies are purposely shielded from users of DITA-Word. Event the xml element tags and attributes are hidden, replaced by MS Word paragraph, character, list and table styles. Thereby enabling users of MS Word to leveraging the advantages of topic oriented writing in a more simple way.