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DITA Open Toolkit Developer Reference

The DITA Open Toolkit Developer Reference is designed to provide more advanced information about the DITA OT. It is geared to an audience that needs information about the DITA-OT architecture, configuring and extending the DITA-OT, and creating DITA-OT plug-ins.

In this section:

  1. DITA Open Toolkit Architecture
    The DITA Open Toolkit is an open source implementation of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee's specification for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) DTDs and schemas. The toolkit uses open source solution of ANT, XSLT (currently 1.0 for most processing, with XSLT 2.0 for PDF) and Java to implement transformation functions from DITA content (maps and topics) into different deliverable formats.
  2. Extending the DITA Open Toolkit
    There are several methods that can be used to extend the toolkit; not all of them are recommended or supported. The best way to create most extensions is with a plug-in; extended documentation for creating plug-ins is provided in the next section.
  3. Configuring the DITA Open Toolkit
    The DITA OT uses .properties files that store configuration settings for the DITA OT and its plug-ins. The configuration properties are available to both Ant and Java processes, but unlike argument properties, they cannot be set at run time.
  4. Creating DITA-OT plug-ins
    The DITA Open Toolkit comes with a built in mechanism for adding in extensions through plug-ins. These plug-ins may do a wide variety of things, such as adding support for specialized DITA DTDs or Schemas, integrating processing overrides, or even providing entirely new output transforms. Plug-ins are the best way to extend the toolkit in a way that is consistent, easily sharable, and easy to preserve through toolkit upgrades.
  5. Customizing PDF output
    Example of PDF output customization with a custom transformation type.
  6. Internal Ant properties
    Reference list of Ant properties used by DITA-OT internally.
  7. Implementation dependent features
  8. Extended functionality
  9. Topic merge
  10. Creating Eclipse help from within Eclipse
    This topic explains how to create an Eclipse help documentation plug-in from within the Eclipse platform. This process allows you to set up repeatable builds directly within Eclipse, which may already be familiar to many developers working within Eclipse. The topic was originally written based on Eclipse 3.3, but much of the information still applies.

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