When Should I Use DITA-OT?

Determining when DITA OT makes sense for your team.

There a several scenarios where using DITA-OT is the appropriate choice for your documentation team, and describing them all is beyond the scope of this guide. However, here are three simple criteria where DITA-OT provides the best solution:

Your documentation suite contains a lot of content that is reusable for different documents and audiences.
Your documentation suite contains documentation for developers using the Eclipse IDE.
Your documentation suite includes both Microsoft HTML Help and PDF-based documents.

DITA-OT is the only publication tool capable of producing both PDF and Eclipse-based documentation from the same source. Eclipse is the industry-standard IDE for many Java developers, and DITA-OT generates the the content and plugin file required for this environment. If your developer audience uses Eclipse, you can easily add IDE-specific online help to your documentation suite.

If your primary audience is end users, rather than software developers and system administrators, you likely need to provide Microsoft HTML Help for them, in addition to PDF-based documentation. DITA-OT is the only tool that produces both from the same source files.