DITA Open Toolkit Version 1.5.3

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. 

DITA-OT 1.5.3 will be a point release based on version 1.2 of the DITA Standard. The 1.5.3 release will take place as a series of 3 week iterations, with each iteration ending in a Milestone build available for testing. Note that release dates below are approximate.

• Anticipated release date: End of June, 2011
• Supports: DITA 1.0 through 1.2
• Download at: DITA-OT Latest Test Build
• Which package is for me? See DITA-OT Packages.

Test build history and plans

• Milestone 1 development began December 20. The first milestone focused on resolving fixes and integrating many patches submitted by users. Milestone 1 was released on January 14, 2011.
• Milestone 2 was two weeks longer than usual, due to holidays for the lead development and test teams. Milestone 2 was released on February 18. It contained improvements to the plugin extension mechanism, as well as many minor bug fixes.
• Milestone 3 was released on March 11. The milestone contained several bug fixes and enhancements to the plug-in mechanism.
• Milestone 4 was released on April 1. Among other things, this milestone includes several improvements to the PDF transform, including code cleanup and additional extension points for plug-ins. Note! Beginning with Milestone 4, users selecting transform type "pdf" are no longer warned that the PDF / PDF2 transform has replaced the "legacypdf" transform.
  
• Milestone 5 will be released on April 22.
• Milestone 6 will be released on approximately May 13.
• Milestone 7 will be released on approximately June 3.
• Milestone 8 will be the final build, as the Stable Release on SourceForge. It will be released on approximately June 24.

Migration from previous releases

Base plug-ins

In earlier releases of OT, configuration parameters were hardcoded into Ant files and Java code. Starting from version 1.5.3 OT has externalized base configurations into base plug-ins in plugins folder. Base plug-in identifiers and folder names start with org.dita:

• org.dita.base
• org.dita.docbook
• org.dita.eclipsecontent
• org.dita.eclipsehelp
• org.dita.htmlhelp
• org.dita.javahelp
• org.dita.odt
• org.dita.pdf
• org.dita.troff
• org.dita.wordrtf
• org.dita.xhtml

For backwards compatibility, only configuration files were moved to plug-in folders, the actual code and resource files were left in original locations.

Installations of OT may remove base plug-ins in order to remove funtionality, but the org.dita.base plug-in must be retained as it contains configuration for base functionality such as catalog files and preprocessing.

Plug-ing configuration changes

The plug-in configuration file plugin.xml has support for new syntax, where the old

<feature extension="foo" value="bar.xml" type="file"/>

can be written as

<feature extension="foo" file="bar.xml"/>

The new file attribute only supports a single file, not a comma separated list like the value attribute.

In previous releases multiple feature elements with the same extension ID were not supported. In release 1.5.3 multiple definitions are combined, thus

<feature extension="foo" value="bar,baz"/>

can also be written as

<feature extension="foo" value="bar"/> <feature extension="foo" value="baz"/>

Plug-in extension points can be added with

<extension-point id="extension-id" name="human readable name"/>

Plug-ins should declare all extension points they support. In version 1.5.3 undeclared extension points are supported, but a warning is thrown when running integration in verbose mode. In future releases support for undeclared extension points may be removed.

PDF2 variable format attribute removed

Support for the format attribute in PDF2 variable files has been remove as redundant. The same functionality as

<variable id="foo" format="bar">baz</variable>

can be implemented with e.g.

<variable id="foo.bar">baz</variable>

PDF2 warning removed

PDF2 no longer logs a warning about PDF2 plug-in replacing the legacy PDF transformation type.

Fixes, patches, and enhancements in 1.5.3

The sections below contain a cumulative list of fixes, patches, and enhancements in the 1.5.3 release. In order to prevent this page from being flagged as spam, individual items do not link directly to SourceForge reports. Each item is followed by a note to indicate which test build first contained the update.

Major Enhancements from the RFE tracker http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=132728&atid=725076

• 3177971 Improve plugin configuration file (Milestone 2)
• 3178275 Add xsl:import extension point to PDF2 topic merge XSL (Milestone 3)
• 3182113 Add common attribute processing to PDF2 plugin (Milestone 3)
• 3185914 Improve integration loggin  (Milestone 3)
• 3189073 Plugin location should be available as Ant property  (Milestone 3)
• 3204188 Support for defining extension point (Milestone 4)
• 3213163 Clean PDF build and integration scripts (Milestone 4)
• 3227387 Need extension to pass user param to dita.map.xhtml.toc targ (Milestone 4)
• 3231695 Use an XML serializer object for writing XML (Milestone 4)
• 3256796 Remove lecagy PDF code from xsl (Milestone 4)

Other Enhancements

• ...

Patches http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=132728&atid=725076

• 3123507 String concat in map2plugin (Milestone 1)
• 3110513 HTML XSLT uses complex casts (Milestone 1)
• 3097677 Add property to reload XHTML stylesheets (Milestone 1)
• 3106659 Added topicgroup elements to tocjs (Milestone 1)
• 3109051 RestoreEntity duplicates functionality (Milestone 1)
• 3107755 Configure templates with integrator properties (Milestone 1)
• 3142967 IndexTermReader leaves tab characters in terms (Milestone 1)
• 3140543 Add missing Commons Codec JAR into compile classpath for buildPackage.xml (Milestone 1)
• 3087664 Clean plugin configuration parser (Milestone 1)
• 3145258 Plug-in integrator code clean-up (Milestone 2)
• 3147226 Use common directory layout for Junit (Milestone 2)
• 3062765 Fix unit test file paths to be platform dependent (Milestone 2)
• 3164523 Refactor platform Java code (Milestone 2)

Bug fixes http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=132728&atid=725074

• 3114411 keyref links don't work for HTML Help (Milestone 1)
• 3126578 Chunking Issues in DITA 1.5.1 (Milestone 1)
• 3109616 More Antenna House Path Problems (Milestone 1)
• 3155375 Incorrect way to specify recognized image extensions (Milestone 2)
• 3157890 Navtitle Construction Does not Preserve Markup (Milestone 2)
• 3155848 xml decl in ditaval file not closed properly (Milestone 2)3162808 Chunking remaps in-file <xref> to invalid value (Milestone 2)
• 3164866 Upper letter estensions (Milestone 2)
• 3165307 Add boilerplate to Java files (Milestone 2)
• 2793836 CHM Index terms come out with extra spaces (Milestone 2)
• 3165762 Initializer XMLReader without modifying system variables (Milestone 2)
• 3175328 Imagemap alt text gets extra text (Milestone 2)
• 3085106 FO: topicmerge drops id on map/topicref without href. (Milestone 2)
• 3147328 Error in commons.xsl: getTopicrefShortdesc (Milestone 2)
• 3130724 Error in tables.xsl: fix-relcolwidth (Milestone 2)
• 3174906 Normalize Map and Bookmap titles for JavaHelp output (Milestone 3)
• 3178361 Conkeyref push fails when equivalent conref push succeeds (Milestone 3)
• 3180681 PDF2: Inconsistent template import / include. (Milestone 3)
• 3191701 Conref Push to Same File Fails (Milestone 3)
• 3191704 Push Replace Results in Pushed element Being removed (Milestone 3)
• 3189883 MapLinksReader should not be namespace aware  (Milestone 3)
• 3164587 Warnings issued by Saxon 9.3.0.4 when publishing to PDF (Milestone 3)
• 3159001 Clean unit tests (Milestone 4)
• 3199985 @chunk : xrefs and links break (Milestone 4)
• 3206158 Inconsistent message DOTJ038W (Milestone 4)
• 3206373 Better handling of referenced SVG images (Milestone 4)