DITA Education

Abstract: Now, it is the world that high and new technology industries dominate. With the expansion of different industry chains and the trend of economic globalization, thousands of innovative solutions enter into the life of people. However, with the appearance of these ideas, initiators always face the challenge of presenting them. An intuitive and absorbing presentation plays the most important role of making the ideas accepted. As the saying goes, “No matter how good a movie is, it is boring without voice”. No matter how superior the products are, they will not be understood without perfect technical documents. This thesis presents the latest information typing architecture – DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) which gives you an overview of technical presentations. As a newly developing XML-based (Extensible Markup Language) standard, DITA is not as popular as it ought to be. Seldom people even technical writers know about DITA and its characteristics. So far, the lack of practical materials leads to the difficulty for beginners to study DITA. The aim of this thesis is mainly to introduce DITA and make a technical tutorial. In order to strengthen the comprehension about DITA, the thesis makes a comparison with DocBook, another popular XML-based standard for technical writing and the most competitive standard of DITA. In the thesis, we collect a large number of materials of DITA and DocBook, and refine them for their comparison. For the practical tutorial, we make some simple examples in a DITA project and implement them on Serna Free, an XML editor. As a result, the thesis presents the detailed comparison between DITA and Docbook, and the tutorial includes the basic and vital part of DITA features.   Key words: DITA map, topic, Syntext Serna Free, tutorial