I started this internship at Scriptorium with very little knowledge of DITA other than the basic definition of it.  One of the major goals of this internship is to learn DITA since it plays such a major role in tech comm.

I have been working on a training exercise that involves on using DITA in oXygen.  The exercise started with the top level, bare bones aspects of DITA.  All I had to do was create topics and add them to the DITA Map.

From there I have worked my way into more specific tags and menu functions.  Learning DITA never stops.  You can always go deeper.  I have spent a lot of time asking questions and searching the Help files.

One thing I highly recommend doing before learning DITA is to learn HTML.  DITA uses a lot of the basic HTML element tags such as <p>, <ul>, <li>, etc.  Knowing HTML gave me a foundation to work with so that the prospect of learning a new language didn’t seem as daunting.

I also recommend familiarizing yourself with XML and its structure. Again, knowledge of HTML comes in handy here because XML uses element tags.  The difference between XML and HTML is that element tags are defined by the developer rather than predefined.

I am still trying to grasp the lingo and understand what each function is.  Misunderstanding the terms for various aspects of DITA such as elements or attributes can make it challenging to ask questions about them. oXygen is helpful though because it shows when certain element tags are not allowed. I think once I actually see the final output, it will make more sense to me.

The only major frustration I have using oXygen is using the Help section. My search terms didn’t seem to bring up relevant results. I also was not pleased that I couldn’t enlarge the font. The font size can easily be adjusted in the main interface.

I worked around the search result and font enlargement problem by going to the user manual on the oXygen website. On the website I can choose HTML or PDF format, and can enlarge the font as big as I need it.

The “learn as I go” approach has been effective for me.  I am a visual learner. I have to interact with the content in order to fully understand it.

Any thoughts or recommendations on the best ways to learn and understand DITA?