Technical Writing: Linking in DITA XML

Technical Writing: Linking in DITA XML, How to Manually and Automatically Create Links in DITA XML using Oxygen XML Author.

Do you wonder how to create links in software documentation written using DITA XML? Do you spend a lot of time trying to find your way through linking in DITA XML?

If yes, I can help!

DITA XML comes with great functionality that can help the technical writer and information developer to organize the documentation in an optimal way.

Any proficient technical writer will tell you that you must create and insert links to external content, such as websites, but also to reference other topics from your DITA map to have a documentation deliverable that provides excellent navigation capabilities for your readers.

But does it mean you need to waste your time to manually craft and then maintain these links? As a technical writer focused on delivering the best possible information to your readers, your time is precious! Maintaining links instead of providing valuable instructions and content for your readers is not what you should do!

How can DITA help you with that?!

You will be surprised to find out how many technical writers do not even know that DITA XML supports automatically generated links. All you need to do is to activate the desired linking option and your links will appear automatically in the generated output!

And it gets even better, the links will appear only when there is a valid linking target!

What are the benefits for you then? Obviously:

• Less time you waste on inserting links.
• Fewer chances to have a broken link in the documentation – leading to higher content quality!
• Better consistency of the links – you choose a linking strategy and the links appear in a consistent style across your entire documentation deliverable.
• More time for you to focus on what matters most – high-quality information delivered to end-users!

This is what you will gain once you learn how to use linking in DITA XML!

In this course, we will cover the following subjects:

Manually Created Links

You will learn how to create a link to:

• a web site
• a resource
• another DITA topic
• between sections on one and the same topic!

Automatically Generated Links

You will learn how to set up and trigger the automatic generation of links using the collection-type attribute. You will learn to create links of type:

• choice
• family
• sequence

These are the subjects we will cover in this course, each of them accompanied by demos and exercises that you can perform using Oxygen XML Author editor.