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 14 has an approximate release date of April 30. The core developers are currently focused on implementing the new processing-role attribute for DITA 1.2, as well as working on several items in the SourceForge bug tracker.

Additional work is being completed on several PDF2 related items. For more information about PDF2, see Plans for the DITA Open Toolkit PDF2 Plug-in

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:

• 2739236      plus-allhtml-svgobject handles <alt> badly
• 2723928     gen-toc template not matching properly
• 2723715     Itemgroup sets @id when element is not open
• 2712074     XHTML: chunk=to-content on map breaks by-reference footnotes
• 2706725     Single quote inserted in empty table cells in FO
• 2647292     HTML stylesheets should style <wintitle> and <filepath>
• 2629271     maplink: should not modify href if scope=external
• 2629256     mapref: should not modify href if scope=external
• 2573681      Move link module does extra processing

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:

• Upgraded versions of many libraries now bundled with the Easy Install package, including Saxon, Ant, and FOP
• Running a PDF transform now runs the PDF2 Plugin by default; select the transform type legacypdf to get the older code.
• The PDF code now runs with updated versions of Saxon
• RFE 2562718 Rename the ant directory to avoid naming collisions with ant
• RFE 2631145 dita2htmlImpl.xsl should not define doctype

Items available in Milestone 11 (February 25, 2009)

•  Maintenance fixes and updates
  
  • Xref without href drops content
  • USEINDEX=no breaks HTML Help HHP
  • Spaces dropped in indexterm that has keyword
• RFE 2314086 Let maplink generate <linklist> elements
• RFE 2258659 Extend integrator to allow addition of messages.
• RFE 2117337 Customize Integrator to integrate custom directories
• Upgraded to Ant 1.7
• Saxon is now bundled for use with PDF2
• PDF2 works with FOP (no requirement for a specific rendering engine)
• Moldflow plugins now available (such as the plus-plugin)

Items available in Milestone 10 (January 20, 2009)

• Maintenance fixes (primarily for chunking) - Design for chunking enhancements
• Updates to PDF2 processing

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)

• 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
• RFE 2074933 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: support for new elements <stepsection> and <steps-informal>
• 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 Item (new addition): @processing-role on topicref and its specializations."normal" means do what we do today. "resource-only" means that if the topic is local, it may be retrieved and used as a resource during processing, but does not generate output on its own.

• 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