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 best place to request enhancements to the DITA Open Toolkit is by opening a Request For Enhancement (RFE) in the RFE tracker at the DITA-OT Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/

General Information

• Information about the current release: DITA-OT 1.5
• Descriptions of the available DITA-OT Packages
• Installing the DITA Open Toolkit
• Publishing with the DITA Open Toolkit
• DITA Processing - what happens during my build?
• List of known Plugins for the DITA Open Toolkit
• Getting the PDF2 plugin to work with FOP: PDF2 with FOP
• Plans for future versions of the DITA Open Toolkit

Discussion topics

• Incremental builds
• Fix indexing
• Document refactoring

Developer information

• For those wishing to contribute to the project, contribution forms are found here: http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/
• General XSLT coding practices in the DITA-OT
• For information on how to extend the the DITA-OT with plug-ins, see all recognized DITA-OT Plug-in extensions
• List of Ant/XSLT parameters to the DITA-OT transform
• Information on Regression testing in the toolkit

Developers and vendors using the toolkit are encouraged to join the dita-ot-developer mailing list. This list is used to discuss upcoming changes that may impact developers or vendors: https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=132728

Active contributors

The toolkit was originally developed within IBM, but was contributed to SourceForge in 2005 and has been updated significantly since that time. Significant contributors include (but are not limited to):

• Robert D Anderson (IBM) - Architect and current project lead, occasional developer
• Stephen Zhang (IBM) - Primary developer
• Deborah Pickett (Moldflow) - Frequent developer and contributor
• Aryeh Sanders and Adena Frazer (Suite Solutions) - responsible for PDF output using the PDF2 transform
• Eric Sirois (IBM) - contributor for several chunks of Eclipse and indexing related code
• Mathew Varghese (Citrix) - DITA User Guide
• Kristen James Eberlein - DITA-OT Documentation, starting June 2009
• ...

Previous contributors

• Don Day (IBM) - Original project lead
• Chris Wong - original contributor of the PDF2 plugin
• Dick Johnson and Anna van Raaphorst (VR Communcations, Inc) - Original contributors of the DITA User Guide
• Many others not yet listed...

Information about older releases

• DITA-OT 1.4.3 Release
• DITA-OT 1.4.2.1 Release
• DITA-OT 1.4.2 Release
• DITA-OT 1.4.1 Release
• DITA-OT 1.4 Release
• DITA-OT 1.3.1 Release
• DITA-OT 1.3
• DITA-OT 1.2.2
• DITA-OT 1.2.1
• DITA-OT 1.2
• DITA-OT 1.1.2.1 patch
  
• DITA-OT 1.1.2
• DITA-OT 1.1.1
• DITA-OT 1.1
• DITA-OT 1.0.2
• DITA-OT 1.0.1
• DITA-OT 1.0