Plans for future versions of the DITA Open Toolkit

The latest version of the DITA-OT 1.8, which was released June, 2013.

Development of new releases takes place using an Agile development process, with several iterations that will accumulate new items until we have enough for a release. Each iteration ends with a Milestone build that is available for testing.

The next version of the DITA-OT will be version 2.0.

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The DITA Open Toolkit The DITA Open Toolkit, or DITA-OT for short, is a set of Java-based, open source tools that provide processing for DITA maps and topic content. You can download the OT and install it for free on your computer to get started with topic-based writing and publishing. Note: while the DITA Standard itself is owned and developed by OASIS, the DITA Open Toolkit is an independent, open source implementation of the standard.

 

The normative information sources for DITA Open Toolkit are:

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The DITA standard does not place limitations on what languages are supported. The only limitations are those placed by the tool or vendor you are using for DITA support.

One example of language support from tools is with generated text - for example, a caption that automatically begins with "Table #" before or after your table.

Another form of language support is in the actual translation of content - if you use a vendor to translate your content, then they will generally support translating to a specific set of languages.

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Eliot Kimber suggested some low-cost (if not free) setups for DITA - and others commented on the dita-users mailing list.

A zero-cost option, with nothing to install, to get you familiar with editing DITA Topics and DITA Maps, is to join DITA Users. You use the browser-based DITA Storm editor or the desktop <oXygen/> XML editor with WebDAV access to author structured content in your own online workspace folder.

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Stem sentences in technical communication have long been considered a standard practice to introduce new content, especially steps in a task. The task stem sentence, generally consisting of a partial sentence such as “To start the machine:” is not supported by any explicit DITA element in the DITA Task information type.

The question is: Should DITA include a stem sentence element in the Task information type?

[By the way, that was a stem sentence.]

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