We are pleased to announce the availability of DITA XProc Pipelines, a library of XProc (http://www.w3.org/TR/xproc/) pipelines that can be used for processing OASIS DITA topics and maps to XHTML and PDF.

The package is available for download from the EMC Developer Network (EDN) XML Technologies website:

http://developer.emc.com/xmltech

The aim of the project is to provide an alternative to the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) that does not rely on file system-based processing, has no direct dependency on Java and Ant, and makes use of the XML processing capabilities of XProc to offer greater flexibility, extensibility, portability, and ultimately also better performance.

The pipelines use standard XProc features as much as possible, so with little or no effort, users should be able to use them with any compliant XProc implementation. The pipelines have been tested with EMC Documentum XProc Engine (Calumet) version 1.0.12. The engine can be downloaded from the EDN XML Technologies website.

The pipeline library is based on OASIS DITA version 1.1, with some DITA version 1.2 feature proposals (keyref and conref push). Sample pipelines are included to demonstrate basic usage, and to help users who want to develop their own pipelines or customize the existing ones.

This is the initial release of the pipelines, and we encourage users to provide feedback on our EDN XML Technologies community website. Updates and supplementary information will appear on EDN as and when available.