With a LearningDITA group license, your company has centralized course management for your DITA team training. You can buy course licenses in bulk, assign specific courses to individual team members, and keep track of course completion. As your team grows, you can increase your quantity of course licenses or add new courses. Our group licensing page tells you how!
In this webinar, Sarah O’Keefe shares the basics of DITA—what it is, why it’s crucial for creating structured content, and how it revolutionizes consistency and efficiency in documentation. By exploring core elements such as topics, maps, and metadata, along with DITA specializations like task, concept, and reference topics, you’ll learn why organizations around the globe use DITA to craft modular, reusable content and put it to work.
You’ll be introduced to a self-paced, online DITA training resource called LearningDITA. Lessons include exercises, links to additional resources and videos, and quizzes to test your knowledge.
What DITA offers is a mechanism for extensibility that doesn’t break the standard. If you’re going to try to build out a system that is futureproof, as best we can without knowing the future, then we need flexibility. We need the ability to change things as we go, to extend, to add new output types, to add new semantics, to add new metadata, to add new systems into the equation.
— Sarah O’Keefe
In this episode, Alan Pringle, Gretyl Kinsey, and Allison Beatty discuss LearningDITA, a hub for training on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). They dive into the story behind LearningDITA, explore our course topics, and share an exclusive coupon code for our podcast listeners.
Gretyl Kinsey: Over time that user base grew and grew. And now it boggles my mind that it got all the way up to 16,000 users. I never expected it to grow to that size.
Alan Pringle: Well, we didn’t really either, nor did our infrastructure. Because as of late 2024, things started to go a little sideways, and it became clear our tech stack was not going to be able to sustain more students. It was very creaky. The site wasn’t performing well. So we made a decision that we needed to take the site offline, and we did, to basically redo it on a new platform.
Your wait is over! LearningDITA is open again, and it’s running on a new platform to give you a better learning experience.
Will DITA bring enough value to your content operations to justify the investment costs? Calculate your DITA ROI to decide.
I found this article in the 2010 (!!) archives and have updated it. Surprisingly, the general gist is still accurate.
There are numerous alternatives for producing PDF output from DITA content. The approach you choose will depend on your output requirements—do you need images floating in text, sidebars, and unique layouts on each page? How often do you republish content? How much content do you publish? Do you need to create variants for different audiences? Do you provide content in multiple languages?
It’s hard to believe that the DITA standard needs additional tags. I tried counting them, but gave up at 150, when I had only reached the letter G. (Be my guest: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/langRef/quick-reference/all-elements-a-to-z.html)
When a DITA-based workflow is the best choice to support business requirements for your content, you may face the daunting task of convincing leadership to move forward with this enterprise-wide change. Sarah O’Keefe shared practical tips for overcoming common objections to DITA during her session at the AEM Guides user conference.
March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.
In episode 141 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar discuss the story behind LearningDITA, the free DITA training created by the Scriptorium team.
What we are trying to do with this site is give people a resource where they can go and, at their own pace, learn about what DITA is and how it can apply to their content and their content processes. It’s a way to take some of the technical mystique out of it, to bring it down and help you learn what it is and how it works.
– Alan Pringle
A common requirement for many digital transformation projects is converting Word-based content into DITA XML.
Consider these factors to ensure a successful conversion effort:
We’ve had the pleasure of implementing DITA in many companies both large and small. Unfortunately, writers almost always have some trepidation about the move. At the same time, there’s a lot for writers to get excited about!
Here are some common remarks from writers—along with responses to encourage a positive outlook about the change.
If you were an early adopter of structured content, there’s a good chance that you have a custom XML content model. This article describes the process Scriptorium uses to make a shift from custom XML into DITA.
Learning content is any material used for educational purposes, including e-learning courses, training guides, instructor guides, instructional videos, and more. This might represent the bulk of the content you produce, or it might be just one part of your overall content set. Either way, it’s important to develop a plan for creating, updating, and delivering learning content as efficiently as possible. Here are some tips for addressing learning content as part of your content strategy.
An organization’s first foray in DITA and structured content is most often driven by one of the following:
You have your technical content in DITA, and you are reaping the benefits of reuse. Now it’s time to move your training content over, but it’s a little confusing to figure out how to structure your content with DITA Learning and Training elements. How can you best set it up to facilitate reuse with your existing DITA content?
LearningDITA.com got a makeover! We rolled out an update to the learning management system to give you a better user experience when taking the courses.
If you had told me in July 2015 that LearningDITA would have 10 courses and be available in three languages, I wouldn’t have believed you. Since the site’s initial launch, it’s grown from a single course to a major resource for those who need to learn to use DITA.
March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.
So you’ve decided to move your content to DITA. You want all the benefits of reuse and less expensive translation, and you’ve completed your content model. But now the question is, “What do we do with our existing content?”
If you’re transitioning to DITA and have a wide variety of documents, it’s probably best to do a phased rollout. When you move into the second phase of that rollout, however, how can you best leverage the work that’s already been done to smooth the process?
March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.
We are rolling out the newest LearningDITA course: The Learning and Training specialization. The specialization is for creators of instructional material, and this course explains how to use it.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Back in 2011, I wrote a post on how to calculate the ROI of DITA.
Scriptorium is hosting a live, interactive question and answer session about the authoring courses on LearningDITA.com! Whether you want to go over a specific exercise or you just need some help getting started, bring your questions and join us for the discussion.
I’ve written in the past on how a QA mindset can improve the quality and consistency of your content. While having a robust test set and test plan are useful, there’s another tool that you can use.
