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One of the most overlooked aspects of DITA conversion is including metadata in your conversion project. Metadata is a powerful tool. Please, leverage it! (Go ahead and picture me shouting this from the rooftops.)

When doing any sort of conversion from one format to another, the riding principle is always GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If your legacy content is not particularly good, then converting it to DITA will only create indifferent content in a so-so DITA markup. The result: failure. So what authoring best practices should you consider before converting your legacy content?

Although conversion is only a small part of your DITA adoption project, it’s the part that causes even smart people to break out into hives. How does one go from a regular, flat document to a series of DITA topics and maps with the correct markup? How do you do that without losing important information? What’s the best way to do it? What tools do you use? How do you start?