Home
Content re-use
Organising re-use topics and elements
Finding elements to re-use
Logically organising re-use elements into re-use files is one strategy to make re-use easier, but a DITA Content Management System will provide management features superior to files in a simple file system.

Introduction
Information types and topics
Topics are the building blocks of modular documents, and organising topics by semantic information types is one of the architectural features of DITA.
DITA map files
Syntax and mark-up
Language and punctuation
Graphics and figures
Cross-referencing
Cross-references are a means of binding individual topics into a coherent and navigable document.
Content re-use
- Content re-use definition
  Content re-use is a means of improving efficiency by eliminating repetition of phrases, blocks of text, topics, and even collections of topics.
- Re-use and the DITA Maturity Model
  Content re-use is one of the features that you should adopt early in your move from style-based authoring to structured authoring with DITA.
- The content reference (conref) attribute
  The conref feature allows DITA content to be used in any number of different places in a collection. The conref attribute in a referencing topic specifies the source topic and the element within that topic to re-use.
- Re-use practices
- Variables
- Organising re-use topics and elements
  - Managing re-use files
    There are two different approaches to managing DITA content re-use files, used to store conref referenced source elements. The preferred approach is to store the elements centrally in a dedicated re-use topic.
  - Organising elements within re-use topics
    You should use logical, identifiable id attributes. Short phrase-level elements intended for re-use can be organised into tables for ease of maintenance.
  - Finding elements to re-use
    Logically organising re-use elements into re-use files is one strategy to make re-use easier, but a DITA Content Management System will provide management features superior to files in a simple file system.
- Embedded topics and ditamaps
  The ditamap is a powerful tool for re-using topics in different output publications. Topics can also be re-used using ditabase topics, but you should avoid this technique.
- Advanced conref principles
Metadata, conditional processing, and indexing
The DITA documentation process
DITA authoring concepts
Moving from style-based authoring to a structured authoring methodology such as DITA requires a radically different approach to writing.

Finding elements to re-use

Logically organising re-use elements into re-use files is one strategy to make re-use easier, but a DITA Content Management System will provide management features superior to files in a simple file system.

One of the challenges of working with re-use elements is how to find and otherwise manage them.

The questions that content authors encounter include:

How do I know whether I have previously written something that I need to re-use?
If I know I've already written something on this subject, but where did I write that?
If I have a chunk of information that I know will be common to three similar tasks, which task do I put the "master" one in?
Can I have conrefs that conref other chunks? Or is that crazy?

Using centralised files to store re-use elements is one strategy that partly helps to resolve these questions. Using logical names for re-use elements is another. However, DITA-aware Content Management Systems have built-in tools for finding re-use opportunities and maintaining re-use elements.