Resources for learning DITA with Oxygen

From time to time we get requests from beginners or from users migrating from other tools who want to start using Oxygen with DITA and they need to know a set of useful resources.

Resources for editing DITA with Oxygen:

We have a getting started section in our user's manual: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/17.1/ug-editor/#topics/eppo-first-dita-topic.html and a larger section on DITA authoring: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/17.1/ug-editor/#topics/author-dita.html.

There are two past webinars about DITA support in Oxygen, you can follow them on our Oxygen YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7LMcO_euJU.

And we have a list of videos, some of them DITA-related here: https://www.oxygenxml.com/videos.html.

Resources for learning DITA:

If you want to start learning about DITA in general there is a web site called Learning DITA.

The DITA 1.3 standard specification can be found here: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/#introduction/dita-release-overview.html.

There are also a number of good books like DITA For Practitioners and the DITA Style Guider.

Resources for customizing the DITA output formats

Usually customizing the XHTML based outputs means creating your custom CSS selectors. If you generate WebHelp output using Oxygen, we have a section explaining basic WebHelp customizations: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/17.1/ug-editor/#topics/customize_webhelp.html.

For PDF-based outputs if you publish via the DITA Open Toolkit we have a section in our user's manual about PDF customizations: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/17.1/ug-editor/#topics/dita-pdf-output.html. There is also a PDF plugin generator created by Jarno Elovirta which can be used in order to customize the PDF layout. The DITA For Print book also covers quite a lot of many customization possibilities. There are also a number of different alternatives to obtain PDF from DITA: http://blog.oxygenxml.com/2015/11/possibilities-to-obtain-pdf-from-dita.html.

DITA Trivia

There are a number of blogs on which you can read various DITA-related articles:

• Oxygen XML Blog: http://blog.oxygenxml.com/.
• Magda Caloian's Think DITA blog: http://think-dita.com/.
• Scriptorium Blog: http://www.scriptorium.com/blog/.
• Eliot Kimber's Blog: http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.ro/.
• A larger selection of technical writing and DITA articles:http://idratherbewriting.com
• List of learning DITA blog posts from Mekon: http://mekon.com/bitesize-dita/

Community

The DITA Users List is probably the first place where you can register and ask for help with DITA-related issues. There is also a Google Groups DITA Users List. Most DITA Users register sooner or later on one of these groups.

There is also a DITA Awareness Group on Linked In.