By:
Don Bridges & Mikhail Vaysbukh
Data Conversion Laboratory
DITA is a hot topic in the 'Tech Docs' arena, and for good reason. DITA is an open standard that addresses many of the needs of technical documentation producers - most notably content reuse needs. The big question for many companies, once they've determined that authoring in this new standard would be beneficial for them, is what to do with the treasure trove of existing documents, known as legacy documents. Would they be useful converted into DITA, and is it worth the effort?
A team encounters quite a few challenges when transitioning from unstructured to structured writing. For my team, the struggles associated with learning DITA and following the DITA structure were minor compared with the challenges presented by corralling hundreds of individual topics into a logical hierarchy. The biggest challenge we faced was managing topic relationships.
In DITA, related topics can be managed either in the DITA topics themselves, or via DITAMAPs using relationship tables <reltable>.
