What Ditaro is, what it isn't

A small set of principles that guide every decision about this tool.

Ditaro is a tool, not a platform.

You install it and use it. There's no account to create, no service to sign up for, no cloud component, no team workspace. If your computer is offline, Ditaro works. If this website disappears tomorrow, your existing installation keeps working.

Your files belong to you.

Ditaro reads and writes standard DITA XML. Files edited in Ditaro can be opened in any compliant DITA editor. There is no Ditaro project file. There is no proprietary format. There is no lock-in. The folder is the project.

We don't break what other tools made.

Vendor-specific annotations — editor comments, vendor-specific attributes, custom DTDs — are preserved on save. Ditaro might not render them, but it won't strip them either. Your team can use Ditaro alongside other DITA tools without one corrupting the other's work.

No telemetry, ever.

Ditaro doesn't track what you do, what files you open, or that you exist. It doesn't phone home. It doesn't have analytics. It doesn't collect usage statistics. Network traffic only happens as the by-product of things you ask for — for example, a git push, or validating a topic whose schema is referenced by URL.

Free, and free.

Ditaro costs nothing. There is no Pro tier, no upgrade path, no premium features behind a paywall. There never will be. If you want to support development, donations are welcome but optional and have no effect on what features you get.

Discoverable over complete.

Commercial DITA editors have more features than Ditaro and probably always will. Ditaro tries to have the features you actually need, named in language you understand, where you'd expect to find them. The goal is that you can do your work without consulting documentation, not that every possible DITA operation has a menu item.

Git is the workflow.

Version control is built in, not bolted on. Branches, commits, diffs, history, blame — all first-class. Reviews happen through pull requests, not through proprietary track-changes formats. This makes Ditaro a better fit for teams that already work in git and a worse fit for teams that don't, and that's an intentional choice.

Built by one person.

Ditaro is maintained by one developer. That sets expectations: decisions are made quickly, the project has a point of view, and response times aren't measured in SLAs. It's a tool with an author, not a product with a roadmap.