Summary of Part V: Key Takeaways

Key takeaways on the value and implementation of content reuse in DITA.

• Content reuse addresses major business costs: It reduces duplicate maintenance, consistency failures, translation inefficiency, and quality degradation in documentation.
• DITA filtering attributes enable sophisticated conditional publishing: audience, platform, product, and custom otherprops support complex reuse scenarios, allowing single-source content to be tailored for various outputs.
• conref provides element-level content reuse with automatic synchronization, ideal for warnings, procedures, and standard content, ensuring consistency across all instances.
• copy-to creates contextual copies of the same content for different navigation or URL requirements, useful when content needs to appear in multiple places with unique navigational paths.
• Effective reuse strategies require planning, including organizing content libraries, making granularity decisions, and establishing robust change management processes.
• The business impact of DITA reuse is substantial, leading to significant maintenance reductions, elimination of consistency errors, and considerable translation savings.