### 7.1 Understanding the purpose of output formats

DITA2Go uses output formats, or styles, as a “presentational vocabulary” for the DITA elements that form the “semantic vocabulary” of your document. Using formats as identifiers is a key part of DITA2Go architecture. Mechanisms for combining element names, element context, outputclass, PI markers, and configuration settings are already in place for formats. A format is more descriptive than any of its sources.

Output formats provide the “glue” between your DITA elements and the resulting output. Many settings in your project configuration file consist of a format name assigned to a particular element or group of elements; subsequent settings assign actions or consequences to those format names. Output format definitions assign style properties to those format names, to determine how content will look.

To get you started, DITA2Go provides format configuration templates that define a set of default output formats and specify their style properties; see §39.1.5 Understanding how format templates are organized. Your project configuration file references these through a chain of configuration templates; see §39.2 Referencing configuration files and templates. The default format names are those shown in §6. Mapping elements to output formats.

Format definitions make understanding a particular format simpler, remove the possibility of misspelling the format name in one of many places, and make it possible to clone a format to make a variant with just a single copy/paste action.

You can specify properties for each format assigned to an element in your DITA document, in a format configuration file. DITA2Go uses the specifications in format configuration files to generate a Word stylesheet, CSS for HTML, or whatever other stylesheet is required by the output type. If you include a setting that is not used by the current output type, DITA2Go ignores that setting. Therefore you can have both RTF-specific and HTML-specific settings in the same format configuration section, and only the appropriate settings will be used. That should make coordinating formats for different outputs fairly easy.

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Next Topic: 7.2 Working with format configuration files

Parent Topic: 7. Configuring output formats

Sibling Topics:

7.2 Working with format configuration files

7.3 Creating aliases to existing format names

7.4 Understanding how to define output formats

7.5 Understanding text output formats

7.6 Configuring text output formats

7.7 Configuring table output formats

7.8 Configuring page layouts for RTF output

7.9 Inserting line, column, and page breaks in output