DITA Open Toolkit Version 1.5.4

Note: while the DITA Standard itself is owned and developed by OASIS, the DITA Open Toolkit is an independent, open sourceimplementation of the standard. 

DITA-OT 1.5.4 is a point release based on version 1.2 of the DITA Standard. The 1.5.4 release will take place as a series of 3 week iterations, with each iteration ending in a Milestone build available for testing. Current plans are that the final 1.5.4 release will be available in early to mid December.

Milestone builds may be downloaded at: DITA-OT Latest Test Build. Not sure which version to download? See DITA-OT Packages.

Release planning

• Milestone 1 development began in June immediately after the 1.5.3 release. The first milestone focused on several minor fixes, as well as on code refactoring for easier maintenance. Milestone 1 was released on July 15, 2011.
• Milestone 2 was released on August 5, 2011.
• Milestone 3 was released on August 25, 2011.
• Milestone 4 was released on September 16.
• Milestone 5 was released on October 14 (four week iteration due to holidays for the primary developer / tester)
• Milestone 6 was released on November 3, 2011.
• Milestone 7 will be released on approximately November 25, 2011.
• The final DITA-OT 1.5.4 package will be released on approximately December 16, 2011.

Fixes, patches, and enhancements in 1.5.4

The sections below contain a cumulative list of fixes, patches, and enhancements in the 1.5.4 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=725077

• 3341648 Clean HTML and XHTML stylesheets  (ongoing)
• 3343562 Java clean-up  (ongoing)
• 3346094 Improve test coverage  (ongoing)
• 3333697 Add strict mode processing (Milestone 1)   
• 3336630 Add resource file extension configuration (Milestone 1)   
• 3323776 Base HTML stylesheets  (Milestone 1) 
• 3355860 Enable defining code ref target encoding (Milestone 1)
• 3393969 Make default TocJS output more usable (Milestone 3)
• 3394708 cfg/catalog.xml should be an extension point (Milestone 4)
• 3411030 Add args.fo.userconfig to PDF2  (Milestone 5)         
• 3411961 Change margin-* to space-* property  (Milestone 5)
• 3412144 Add FOP specific shell to PDF2  (Milestone 5)
• 3413215 Add schemas for PDF2 configuration files  (Milestone 5)
• 3414416 Support bookmap order in PDF2 front and back matter  (Milestone 5)
• 3413933 Fix inconsistencies in PDF2 page headers  (Milestone 5)
•  3418877 Mechanism to refer to other plug-ins in XSLT  (Milestone 5)
• 3411476 Add extension point for print type declaration  (Milestone 6)
• 3392891 Copy the graphic files to the temporary folder (Milestone 6)    
• 3429290 Remove unused Apache Commons Logging JAR (Milestone 6)

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

• ...

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

• 3323806 Improve Java logging and exception handling (ongoing) 
• 2714699 FO plug-in doesn't support specialized index elements (Milestone 1)
• 2848636 Duplicate key definitions should produce info messages (Milestone 1)
• 3353955 Frontmatter child order is not retained in PDF2 (Milestone 1)
• 3354301 XRef with conreffed phrases not properly generate HTML link (Milestone 1)
• 3281074 Bad attribute being applied to fo:bookmark-title element (Milestone 2)
• 3344142 Conref Push order of validation (Milestone 2)
• 3358377 Cryptic error message when DITA Map has "bookmap" extension (Milestone 3)
• 3384673 ODF transtype no longer embeds images in output (OT 1.5.3) (Milestone 3)
• 3394000 TocJS needs cleanup for several minor bugs (Milestone 3)
• 3392718 TOCJS sample should not require ant target (Milestone 3)
• 3389277 DocBook transform redundantly nests Related Links (Milestone 3)
• 3105339 '<' and '>' characters in a title cause tocjs trouble (Milestone 3)
• 3104497 tocjs JavaScripts don't work in Japanese environment (Milestone 3)
• 3394130 Remove outdated developer documentation (Milestone 3)
• 3397165 chunk on topichead not honored (Milestone 4)
• 3397501 Custom reltable column headers are reversed (Milestone 4)
• 3397495 Relcolspec with <title> does not generate link group headers (Milestone 4)
• 3399030 <ph> Elements not flagged with alt-text in HTML output (Milestone 4)
• 3396884 NPE in EclipseIndexWriter.java<Merges,setLogger for AbstractIndexWriters (Milestone 4)
• 3398004 -d64 flag to JVM not allowed for Windows JVMs (Milestone 4)
• 3401323 Fix PDF nested variable handling (Milestone 4)
• 3401721 Processing broken for <topicsetref> elements (Milestone 4)
• 3404049 Setting of clean_temp is backwards     (Milestone 4)
• 3386590 Product name repeated hundreds of times in PDF (Milestone 4)
• 3405417 Shortdesc output twice when using abstract (Milestone 4)
• 3402165 wrong image output dir if using generate.copy.outer=2 (Milestone 4)
• 2837095 Positions of index and TOC in bookmaps are ignored  (Milestone 5)
• 3414826 DITA OT not handling image path with chunking turned on (Milestone 5)
• 3411767 Not so meaningful messages given by ImgUtils (Milestone 5)
• 3405851 Incorrect entry@colname in merged XML with row and colspan (Milestone 5)
• 3406357 Custom profiling issue (Milestone 5)
• 3413203 Remove references to OpenTopic in PDF2 (Milestone 5)
• 3414270 @props specialization not used in map (Milestone 5)
• 3418953 Scale computation for XHTML uncorrectly looks up images (Milestone 6)
• 3413229 onlytopic.in.map & symlink (Milestone 6)
• 3423537 Additional line breaks in <menucascade> should be ignored  (Milestone 6)
• 3423672 Problems with refs to images outside the DITA Map directory (Milestone 6)