DTD Topic Type Shell Tutorial Step 1: Copy Existing Shell

Create a directory in your workspace to hold the new document type shell, e.g., "workspace/myTopicShell". In the myTopicShell directory create the directory dtd.

Find the file topic.dtd in the technical content area of the standard DITA DTD distribution (dtd/technicalContent/dtd/topic.dtd in the files packaged with the Open Toolkit) and copy it into the workspace/myTopicShell/dtd working directory as file myTopic.dtd.

Note: The DITA 1.2 DTD distribution includes two document type shells for <topic>: topic.dtd, in the technical documentation area, and basetopic.dtd, in the base area. The topic.dtd shell integrates all the different topic domains that are part of the standard DITA vocabulary. The basetopic.dtd only integrates the highlighting, indexing, and utility domains. For thus tutorial I'm having you use topic.dtd so that you get experience removing things.

In the myTopicShell directory, create a new XML document named mytopic-test-dtd.xml that uses myTopic.dtd as its document type with this content:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE topic SYSTEM "dtd/myTopic.dtd">
<topic id="topic-1">
  <title>Topic title</title>
  <body>
    <p>Topic paragraph</p>
  </body>
</topic>

This document serves as your test document to verify that you haven't made any syntax errors in the new shell.

Open this document in your XML editor (e.g., in OxygenXML) and validate it. It should be valid.