About reuse

DITA and DITA Open Toolkit support three kinds of reuse:

Content reuse, in which a source topic or part of a topic is written once and used in multiple locations. For example, you might reference the same concept topic (say, processing DITA files) in both the processing and the troubleshooting maps. Another example might be to use the DITA content reference (conref) mechanism to reuse content once (say, using the text of a controlled vocabulary topic in an "about" file) or many times (say, repeating a short warning statement about the proper use of a hardware unit).
Information design reuse (specialization), in which you extend the definition of an existing DITA element to be used in a special way. Specialization makes use of the fact that DITA is based on the principle of inheritance.
Processing reuse, in which you override stylesheet processing to customize your output.

The following topics provide information about how to implement information design reuse (specialization) and processing reuse, and the production notes topic for this section provides examples of how conrefs have been used in this document (content reuse).