Authoring DITA Documents

DITA authoring has a number of peculiarities as DITA documents differ significantly from documents of other document types.

The major peculiarities of DITA authoring lie in the following:

Work with references

Referencing is an effective means of content reuse in DITA. Content reuse is available at different levels (elements, topics, maps) by means of different types of references.

Serna's DITA usability tools greatly simplify different operations with references in DITA documents. Besides, Serna validates references and lets you navigate to the target of a reference.
Important:
All versions of Serna support DITA. However, DITA usability tools, which facilitate the insertion of common DITA constructs, and reference navigation are available in the Enterprise edition and the trial version of Serna only.
DITA ID management

In DITA, the uniqueness of ID attributes within a specific scope is essential for making references.

DITA IDs are ID attributes of non-topic elements. Unlike IDs of topic elements, which must be unique within the scope of the whole document, DITA IDs must be unique within the scope of the parent topic or map. DITA IDs are specially treated in Serna.

When you work with DITA documents, Serna maintains the uniqueness of DITA elements' IDs and reports duplicate DITA IDs.
Work with DITA custom content

You can use DITA custom content to quickly insert the most common DITA content portions. DITA custom content differs from Docbook custom content.
Work with images

Learn about supported image formats and placement of images in DITA documents.
Deprecated content

Some XML content is inadvisable in DITA.