Revision of Plans for DITA-OT 1.5 from Fri, 2009-12-18 18:56

DITA Open Toolkit version 1.5

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 final DITA-OT 1.5 release is now available!

 DITA-OT 1.5 contains full support for the DITA 1.2 specification. Development of 1.5 took place as a series of 3-week iterations, with one or more significant item completed in each iteration. Each iteration ended with a milestone release available under the "test build" heading at the DITA-OT download page on SourceForge. The updates included with each milestone build are listed below.

The DITA-OT 1.5 package can be downloaded from SourceForge. To determine which package you need, see DITA-OT Packages.

Items available in the final DITA-OT 1.5 build

The final build of DITA-OT 1.5 contains all of the fixes listed below for previous milestones, as well as a few new items related to the PDF transform. However, many additional updates were made to the PDF transform without being recorded at the time of release; those updates are listed here, but most initially appeared earlier in a milestone build:

  • Out of the box Antenna House support - you only have to set the Ant parameter pdf.formatter=ah.  You might want to check that the environment variable AXF_DIR is set to point to your Antenna House directory, but it's only necessary if it's in a non-standard place or it's newer than AH Formatter 5.1.
  • Task elements are handled in separate XSL files.  This makes them a little easier to find, but it also corrects a slew of priority bugs.
  • The @scale attribute on images is supported as per the spec.
  • xml:lang is supported.  The first xml:lang sets the language for the whole document, unless the document.locale parameter is set.  Additionally, xml:lang works on an element by element level for variable substitutions, which can be useful for example for a multilingual warnings section.
  • Spacing was improved at the cost of a little fragility:  The <indexterm>s in <prolog> now actually generate their anchors inside the title text, which prevents some strange spacing problems.  However, this means that customizations that override the template that generates the title need to be updated.
  • attr-set-reflection.xsl now actually works.  It used to be that some attribute sets were "fakes" - topic.topic.title for example couldn't have <xsl:if> or <xsl:variable> in it.  Now all attributes sets are "real" - they all support normal xsl behavior.
  • basic-settings.xsl - there's a new file that allows you to set margins and page size and default font size and the side-column width (i.e. the indent of normal body text) without making tons of changes all over the place.
  • Notices now appear before the TOC.  However, the bookmarks still appear after the TOC; this is a bug.
  • The > character is now the default in a menucascade instead of that arrow character that wasn't in anyone's fonts.
  • shortdesc and abstract appear even in the first topic of a chapter, fixing an old bug.
  • Most topics are generated via a common template: <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="commonTopicProcessing"/>, which allows more sophisticated template matching if warranted.
  • layout-masters.xsl replaces layout-masters.xml, allowing xsl templates and variables for simpler coding of layout masters.
  • <xref> text is done with a moded pattern match, which means that you don't have to override the whole huge template to change one type of xref.
  • The TOC text is generated via pattern matches, so you can overwrite TOC text for one type of entry without changing the whole template.
  • A step with importance="optional" now generates an Optional label on that step.
  • Saxon 9 is the default, which means XSLT2 is supported.
  • Existing classpath is no longer ignored.
  • bookmarks default to collapsed, and there are both Ant and stylesheet parameters to change that.
  • Ant parameter args.chapter.layout or $chapterLayout='BASIC' removes the whole Mini-TOC at the start of each chapter.
  • Ant parameter retain.topic.fo set to any value will retain topic.fo for debugging.
  • FOP support somewhat improved, but there's still no index until FOP starts supporting the necessary elements.
  • @pgwide supported on tables
  • Some letters was from the French index are fixed

Items available in Milestone 24 (December 4, 2009)

Milestone 24 was added to allow time for some final PDF fixes, which were delayed past the original Milestone 23 code freeze date. Many of the fixes added in M24 are collected with other previous fixes in the list above this item. In addition, the following updates are included:

Items available in Milestone 23 (November 22, 2009)

Milestone 23 contains the following enhancement and fixes:

Items available in Milestone 22 (October 30, 2009)

Milestone 22 includes the following updates and fixes:

Items available in Milestone 21 (September 29, 2009)

Items available in Milestone 20 (September 14, 2009)

Items available in Milestone 19 (August 24, 2009)

Milestone 19 adds support for DITA 1.2 constraint validation into the conref processor. It also contains the following items from the SourceForge trackers:

Items available in Milestone 18 (August 3, 2009)

Milestone 18 completes the initial implementation of Delayed Conref for Eclipse output. It also contains the following fixes and enhancements:

Items available in Milestone 17 (July 10, 2009)

Milestone 17 contains an initial implementation of the DITA 1.2 "Delayed Conref Resolution" function. This function will be completed for Eclipse XHTML output in a future milestone. The milestone also includes several bug fixes from the SourceForge bug tracker:

Items available in Milestone 16 (June 23, 2009)

Milestone 16 completes the initial implementation of the OASIS DITA 1.2 Controlled Values File. In addition, it contains the following items:

Items available in Milestone 15 (May 27, 2009)

Milestone 15 includes support for filtering based on Controlled Values Files (a new map specialization that is part of DITA 1.2). In addition to that major new item, the Milestone contains the following updates from the SourceForge enhancement, patch, and bug trackers:

Items available in Milestone 14 (April 29, 2009)

Milestone 14 now uses the DITA 1.2 document types when processing, without the need to reference those document types directly. It also includes support for the processing-role attribute in maps, which is the most recent addition to DITA 1.2 and allows a map to reference topics that will not generate output with other topics.

Items available in Milestone 13 (April 9, 2009)

Milestone 13 includes an update to metadata cascading within maps; previously, metadata would cascade from topicref to topicref and into the referenced topic, but the temporary map was not re-saved with the cascaded values. This is now fixed, so that additional processing may be done on the map without having to re-implement the cascade logic.

Milestone 13 also fixes several bugs reported at SourceForge:

Items available in Milestone 12 (March 18, 2009)

Milestone 12 was released April 18, 2009. Due to delays in approval of DITA 1.2, and consequential delays in the 1.2 based DITA-OT 1.5, milestone 12 also released as the official an official release in the 1.4.* series: DITA-OT 1.4.3 Release

Milestone 12 includes the following updates over previous milestones:

Items available in Milestone 11 (February 25, 2009)

Items available in Milestone 10 (January 20, 2009)

Items available in Milestone 9 (December 17, 2008)

  • Improvements to support DITA 1.2 item 12050 (new linking attributes)
  • Maintenance fixes (many related to chunking, others related to previous test builds)
  • "Full easy install" includes both the older and newer versions of FOP as we transition to embedded support of the PDF2 code

Items available in Milestone 8 (November 24, 2008)

  • Support for <coderef> (OASIS Item 12060)
  • Improvements on OASIS Item 12026: New glossary type: processing to support surface form of acronyms when appropriate
  • Include latest PDF2 plugin in "full easy install", and migrate older PDF transform to demo directory; the older PDF transform is now called with the transform type "legacypdf"

Items available in Milestone 7 (October 31, 2008)

  • OASIS Item 12026: New glossary type: processing to support surface form of acronyms when appropriate ([[Design for implementing OASIS Item 12026]])
  • OASIS Item 12060: Support for new referencing element <coderef>(Design for implementing OASIS Item 12060)

Items available in Milestone 6 (September 27, 2008)

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 12043: draft-comment in shortdesc, body, conbody. Need to validate for PDF.
  • OASIS Learning Subcommittee work: make plugin available
  • OASIS Machine Industry work: make plugin available
New items for consideration, unrelated to OASIS
  • 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
XML.org Focus Areas: BPEL | DITA | ebXML | IDtrust | OpenDocument | SAML | UBL | UDDI
OASIS sites: OASIS | Cover Pages | XML.org | AMQP | CGM Open | eGov | Emergency | IDtrust | LegalXML | Open CSA | OSLC | WS-I