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Language and punctuation
Titles and headings
Titles are used in a number of mark-up structures in DITA. Titles are a mix of content and metadata. The mark-up in titles should be kept as simple as possible, and workarounds to achieve specific formatting outcomes should not be used.
Line breaks in titles
There is no line break element or equivalent in DITA.

Introduction
Information types and topics
Topics are the building blocks of modular documents, and organising topics by semantic information types is one of the architectural features of DITA.
DITA map files
Syntax and mark-up
Language and punctuation
- Avoiding writing for output
  Do not include formatting information in your DITA content topics.
- Stem sentences, glue text, and other transitional information
  Transitional information, such as stem sentences, is largely redundant in DITA's minimalist, topic-based, semantic mark-up architecture. The role of transitional information in contextualising the content has been eliminated through the use of smaller chunk sizes, meaningful titles, information typing, structure, and demarcation labels automatically-generated in the output.
- Punctuation in lists
  Ordered and unordered list items should have no terminating punctuation marks, such as commas, semicolons, and full stops, except when all items in a list are complete sentences. This approach maximises re-usability.
- Titles and headings
  Titles are used in a number of mark-up structures in DITA. Titles are a mix of content and metadata. The mark-up in titles should be kept as simple as possible, and workarounds to achieve specific formatting outcomes should not be used.
  - Case in titles
    Sentence case should be used for topic, section, figure, table and other titles.
  - Line breaks in titles
    There is no line break element or equivalent in DITA.
  - Where topic titles are used
    Topic titles are used to form the heading in the output deliverable document, as well as for other constructs such as link text and metadata values.
  - Crafting meaningful topic titles
    Writing accurate, concise and consistent topic titles is an important challenge for DITA authors. Guidelines for crafting title text make this task a little easier.
  - Conditional titles
    A title element in DITA does not have the normal metadata attributes used for conditional publishing. However, it is possible to carefully use conditions on elements nested within a title element.
- Crafting paragraphs
  A paragraph should contain one unit of thought or action, or main point, and should be typically three to eight sentences in length. All of the sentences in a paragraph should relate to its main point.
- Different languages
  The xml:lang attribute stores the human language of the content, and can be applied to any DITA element.
- Quotation marks
  Quotation marks should not be included in DITA content. The marks should be added, if required, during the publishing process.
Graphics and figures
Cross-referencing
Cross-references are a means of binding individual topics into a coherent and navigable document.
Content re-use
Metadata, conditional processing, and indexing
The DITA documentation process
DITA authoring concepts
Moving from style-based authoring to a structured authoring methodology such as DITA requires a radically different approach to writing.

Line breaks in titles

There is no line break element or equivalent in DITA.

Line breaks are formatting constructs, so in general, DITA mark-up doesn't provide for them. However, it's not quite so clear cut. Despite working to the ideal that content should be separated from form, DITA does provide for a good deal of form mark-up.

Table column widths can be specified in DITA, even though that's form. Image sizes can be specified in DITA, and that too is form.

It is possible to use these loopholes in the separation of content and form to make possible things such as line breaks in titles. For example, a workaround is to place a one pixel by one pixel image within the title, and set the image element's placement attribute to break. This will cause, in most outputs, the title to be displayed with text before the image displayed on a different line to text following.

You must avoid the temptation to use such workarounds in an attempt to introduce form into DITA content.