DITA Open Toolkit Version 1.6

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. 

DITA-OT 1.6 is a new major release based on version 1.2 of the DITA Standard. The 1.6 release will took place as a series of development iterations, with each iteration ending in a Milestone build available for testing.The final 1.6 biuld was released June 27, 2012.

The final build of DITA-OT 1.6 may be downloaded here: DITA-OT Latest Stable Build. Not sure which distribution package to download? See DITA-OT Packages.

Release dates

• Milestone 1 was released February 10, 2012.
• Milestone 2 was released March 2, 2012.
• Milestone 3 was released on March 24, 2012.
• Milestone 4 was released on May 8, 2012.
• Milestone 5 was released on June 5, 2012.
• The final build of DITA-OT 1.6 was released on June 27, 2012.

Release highlights

Performance improvements

DITA-OT 1.6 contains several updates that combine for significant performance improvements for large documents. For example, building the DITA 1.2 Language Specification to XHTML takes just over 1/3 of the time as with the previous release (tests show an improvement of 288%).

Error message overhaul

In the recent DITA-OT usage survey, we asked for specific problems encountered when running the DITA-OT. The most frequent response was difficulty understanding and responding to error messages. The latest release addresses this in two ways:

1. Every message has been reviewed, and nearly every message has been revised for clarification.
2. Messages are now documented in the DITA-OT User Guide. The new documentation contains additional details about nearly every message, including potential remedies and links to helpful information.

Code cleanup

Of particular interest to developers, much of the deprecated code in the toolkit (some of it unused for 5+ years) has been removed. As a result, much of the code is cleaner, faster, and easier to customize. For example, the cleanup of PDF code allowed us to remove the alternate *_1.0.xsl stylesheets.

All fixes, patches, and enhancements in 1.6

A complete list of fixes, patches, and new features in the 1.6 release can be found at the GitHub issues page used to track development: Details of each update in release 1.6

To jump directly to the release notes, which contains a list of updates and additional information on backwards compatibility with previous releases, check the documentation under User Guide > Release notes.