Evaluation Guide for DITA OT

Let me first start off by thanking the folks who read my post last week. It was heartening to see more than 290 “reads”. I decided to follow up with something more concrete this week. As I mentioned earlier, the DITA OT User Guide is a treasure trove of information and I am merely trying to reorganize the DITA topics in the guide into smaller and usable chunks of information. While some of these chunks might end up as guides, the others might end up as articles, FAQs, etc. To illustrate this. I have begun work on an Evaluation Guide for MS Windows users. This guide is aimed at helping first-time users evaluate OT in a more meaningful manner. The reason why I decided to address such a niche area is because it represents the largest proportion of users. This guide will entirely consist of content from the existing user guide. I’ve already started work on the DITA map and hope to be ready with the guide next week. While I’m at it, here’s the ToC. Please feel free to send me your feedback. I’d like to add a few case studies at the end. So please feel free to contribute.

Installing and upgrading DITA Open Toolkit

System requirements and supported applications

Installation overview

Installing your DITA authoring tool

Installing the Java SDK (JDK)

Installing the DITA Tookit full package distribution

Directories and files in the ditaot directory

Setting up your working environment

(Links to chapters in the UG)

Processing (building) and publishing DITA documents

About the garage sample

Processing to the key Toolkit output targets

Creating DITA topics

About the grocery shopping sample

About topics

Creating topics

About concepts

Creating concepts

About tasks

Creating tasks

About reference information

Creating reference topics

Processing (building) a single topic

For more information (topics)

Creating DITA maps

About maps

Creating maps

Processing (building) the grocery shopping sample

Processing using multilevel maps

For more information (maps)

Linking your content

About linking

Linking using cross-references (xrefs)

Linking using related links

Linking using relationship tables

For more information (linking)

Expanding and customizing access to your information

About indexing

About metadata

For more information (accessing)

Reusing your content

About content reuse

DITAblogs (content reuse)

For more information (reuse)

Customizing your published output

Conditional processing

About conditional processing

Using conditional processing

Adding metadata to elements

Filtering content

Flagging content

Showing revisions

Using your own CSS (cascading style sheet)

Adding a product logo to a PDF2 cover page

Managing your DITA source content

Backing up your source files

About library or source control systems

About content management systems

DITAblogs (managing content)

For more information (managing content)

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