Even with minimal investment, you can realize returns from adopting DITA. Many teams make the move to DITA to gain greater reuse of their content. Working with their current source, they use conditional processing to generate multiple versions of the same document. Even with non-typed topics or multiple topics in the same file, you can easily specify conditions and generate conditional output with DITA. This remains the primary means for reusing content at the first level of adoption.
However, to make progress toward the goal of additional reuse, you can use DITA to meet the challenge of publishing new or multiple deliverables that contain the same information by single-sourcing the content. The DITA Open Toolkit provides default output processing for a wide variety of popular formats, including HTML files, Eclipse3 plug-ins, PDFs, and CHM (Microsoft® Compiled HTML Help) files. You can easily generate the same information in multiple formats by specifying a different output type when you publish.
When you publish content, the publishing transform applies the specified formatting to each element, which allows you to easily update format styles for large quantities of information. For example, if the style for highlighting the first instance of a term is italics, but later is changed to bold, you simply update the CSS and regenerate the deliverables. This is much more effi cient than searching for and updating each instance of a term or style element across the information set.
For links between content, most teams use hard-coded cross-references in their current source. At the basic DITA adoption level, you can continue this practice and link between DITA topics, as well as to external documents or locations, such as Web sites.
Lastly, at this level, most teams utilize minimal or unmanaged metadata and primarily focus on terms, such as index terms.
By migrating the content source to XML and chunking it according to the appropriate topic type, the first level of adoption supports conditionally generating output and positions you for greater reuse and output flexibility at the next level.
For more information, see: http://dita.xml.org/wiki/level-one-topicsÂ