Key concepts (DITAdemystified)

This chapter contains information about some of the key concepts required to understand and use DITA and DITA Open Toolkit.

• Documentation lifecycle
  
• Processing and publishing
  
• Project components
  Key DITA project components include source files (for example, DITA source files, image files, ditaval files, and ditamaps), processing files (for example, batch scripts and Ant scripts), and output files (for example, XHTML topic files, XHTML TOC, HTML help TOC, HTML, index file, and PDF file). Most of the examples in the following sections are from the garage sample, which is available as part of the DITA Open Toolkit User Guide package.