Plans for DITA Open Toolkit version 1.5

We currently anticipate that DITA-OT 1.5 will contain support for the DITA 1.2 specification. Development of 1.5 will be broken up into a series of iterations, with one or more DITA 1.2 item completed in each iteration. We will update the plans here as each iteration begins and ends. Each iteration will end with a milestone release available under the "test build" heading at the DITA-OT download page on SourceForge.

At present, the DITA 1.2 DTDs and schemas are integrated in demo mode. They will only be used when documents reference them directly, or when the catalog is updated so that they are the default. As the document types become more stable, we will integrate them so that ordinary documents validate against them, but for now any files using the default document types will validate against DITA 1.1.

The original proposal for each OASIS DITA 1.2 Item is at ImplementationStatus1.2, although the items may be revised as they are added to the draft specification. The latest draft specification is available in DITA, CHM, or TOCJS format.

Items under development in the current iteration

Milestone 7 has an approximate release date of October 27. In addition to maintenance fixes, it will include support for the following items:

• OASIS Item 12026: New glossary type: processing to support surface form of acronyms when appropriate
• OASIS Item 12060: Support for new referencing element <coderef>
• Time permitting:  OASIS Item 12050: Support for new linking attributes in new places
• RFE 1725284: add support for headings for sections within task - Complete implementation - support for translations added in Milestone 4.

Additional work is being completed on these PDF2 related items, which are not yet part of the milestone builds:

• Bug fix 1803111: Idiom plug fails when processing bookmap with DITA composite
• Bug fix 1829816: Value of otherprops is written as a text element
• Bug fix 1930201: FO 1.4.2 doesn't fail correctly when called from Ant
• Bug fix 1942252: <notices> should come before TOC in PDF output
• Bug fix 1951879: Link generation is disabled for bookmaps
• For more information about PDF2, see Plans for the DITA Open Toolkit PDF2 Plug-in

Items available in Milestone 6 (September 27, 2008)

• OASIS Item 12007: Keyref (Design for implementing OASIS Item 12007) - finish keyref support by turning non-linking items (term, keyword) into links
• OASIS Item 12048: Add topic references to reltable headers to improve link management. Design for implementing OASIS Item 12048
• Update to Java Index processing to make it extensible for new index types

Items available in Milestone 5 (September 2, 2008)

• OASIS DITA 1.2 Item 12007: Additional support for keyref (conkeyref, text insertion)
• OASIS DITA 1.2 Item 12043: Draft comment supported in shortdesc
• OASIS DITA 1.2 Item 12050a: support for new longdescref element
• Bug fix 2061301 Useless import of xslt4j stops dost.jar being built

Items available in Milestone 4 (August 8, 2008)

• OASIS Item 12007: Keyref (Design for implementing OASIS Item 12007) - including the following items:

• Resolve keyref values in a map (redirecting the href on a topicref)
• Resolve keyref values in a topic (redirecting the href on an xref or link)

• Improve implementation for OASIS Item 12015: Conref push
• Bug fix 2027170: maprefImpl.xsl removes part of class attr from topichead
• Bug fix 2027058: Topichead element stops map processing in ChunkMapReader
• RFE 1803199: allow ability to include class ancestry in XHTML class attribute
• RFE 1725284: add support for headings for sections within task. INCOMPLETE - translations added, output support not yet included.

Items available in Milestone 3 (July 22, 2008)

• OASIS Item 12015: Conref push (ready for design) Design for implementing 12015 - initial implementation included in Milestone 3, more to come later
• Chunking fixes Design for fixing chunking bugs
  • Bug fix 1897542 Chunk to-content may need to rewrite topic IDs
  • Bug fix 1897497 Chunking to-content reprocesses maps and duplicates content
  • Bug fix 2008317 Chunking one topic from a large file hogs memory
• Bug fix 2008294 End flag does not work in ditaval
• Bug fix 1999117 Ubuntu 8.04 | startcmd.sh doesn't work
• OASIS Item 12020: New text element, support with fallthrough as text
• OASIS Item 12021: sectiondiv and bodydiv: support two new block elements
• Bug fix 2004588 Image alt text needs space normalized
• Bug fix 1553905 Unkown XSL-FO property in dita2fo-calstable.xsl
• RFE 1996733 Structure Ant <pipeline> better
• Fix backslashes in $PATH2PROJ in XSLT

Items available in Milestone 2 (June 25, 2008)

• DITA 1.2 OASIS Item 12013: Conref range 12013 design
• RFE 1982567 Support for spaces in file and directory names RFE 1982567 design
• RFE 1995667 Add plugin extension points to preprocess pipeline
• Additional updates to OASIS Item 12017 (introduced in Milestone 1)
• Bug fix 2001268 DITA-OT documentation still asks for JDK 1.4
• Plugin enhancements to <require> in plugin.xml

Items available in Milestone 1 (May 30, 2008)

• DITA 1.2: Include DITA 1.2 draft DTDs and Schemas (preserve DITA 1.1 modules for users that want a specific version)
• DITA 1.2 OASIS Item 12017: Updated metadata in maps to match topics. Need update to code that pushes metadata into topics and pulls metadata from topics; need to update output processors that use this metadata. 12017 design
• DITA 1.2 OASIS Item 12018: support for navtitle element (navtitle attribute is deprecated), possibly other elements. 12018 design
• RFE 1972537 Let users specify reloadstylesheet on xslt tasks
• RFE 1796007 Refactor of related links HTML for specialized processing
• Bug fix 1955211 Footnotes-by-reference rendered naively
• Bug fix 1900429 Inconsistent stylesheets for topics and index files in XHTML
• Bug fix 1803199 XHTML: Add class to generated <pre>

Items for future DITA-OT 1.5 iterations:

The following DITA 1.2 items are still incomplete:

• OASIS Item 12008: Constraints. Expect impact on conref, generalization
• OASIS Item 12010: Topic and domain integration: Expect impact on conref, generalization
• OASIS Item 12011: More general task: likely no impact apart from support for constraints and inclusion of new DTD/Schema
• OASIS Item 12014: Delayed conref resolution: unsized impact on conref processors (ready for design)
  Note:
  DTD for topic prologs not ready
  Interface with Eclipse not clear
• OASIS Item 12020: New text element, support with fallthrough as text (still need for PDF)
• OASIS Item 12021: sectiondiv and bodydiv: support two new block elements (still need for PDF)
• OASIS Item 12031: Controlled values: support new markup used to validate content of attributes
• OASIS Item 12036: Support new scaling attribute on images
• OASIS Item 12043: draft-comment in shortdesc, body, conbody. Need to validate for PDF.
• OASIS Item 12055: May need to update 'mapref' behavior

• OASIS Learning Subcommittee work: make plugin available
• OASIS Machine Industry work: make plugin available

New items for consideration, unrelated to OASIS

• Move deprecated PDF transform to a plugin, and integrate PDF2 plugin into core
• Improved JavaDoc in source code
• Easier (possibly graphical) install
• Easy to use sample style overrides
• Common interfaces for calling builds, when for products that imbed the toolkit
• XSLT 2.0 support
• Simple interface for setting parameters when running a build