#### 1.1.1 How DITA2Go is organized

DITA2Go is organized around the idea of formats, which are packages of presentational content, just as elements are packages of semantic content.

To convert your DITA source to an HTML or RTF representation, DITA2Go provides the means to perform two primary tasks:

- Map DITA elements to output formats.
- Define presentational properties of those output formats.

DITA2Go also carries out a number of output-type-dependent secondary tasks, such as constructing Help file infrastructure.

For each element in your DITA document, DITA2Go considers the element and its context, then maps the content to an appropriate output style. You can change the mapping, add exceptions, and revise the styles.

To map DITA elements to output formats, DITA2Go relies on both rules and instance mark-up. Rules come from settings in configuration files; instance mark-up is in the DITA files themselves, either as @outputclass values or as processing instructions (PIs).

To define format presentation, DITA2Go uses rules based on settings in format configuration files that include output formats for text and tables, and also for headers and footers and page layout formats for RTF output. Your DITA2Go distribution comes with a set of predefined output formats. You can override the definitions of these formats, and define additional formats of your own. DITA2Go provides a way to specify presentation that works for both HTML and RTF output, which are radically different output types. The method is based mainly on CSS, but using configuration-file syntax, with extensions to support native CSS and RTF as needed. This approach incorporates the notion of “based” formats, as in Word, so that entire branches can be adjusted with just one setting.

For output-type-dependent transformations, the rules are in chains of output-type-specific configuration files; for a particular document, the rules are in DITA-source-specific configuration files. Configuration inheritance simplifies common styling across a set of projects, using a single-source set of formats.

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Parent Topic: 1.1 What you need to know

Sibling Topics:

1.1.2 File, directory, and path names

1.1.3 Output types you can specify

1.1.4 Languages and character sets