Resources for Beginners
DITA in a nutshell:
An easy tutorial at the level of "what you need to know to get started:"
* http://www.xmlmind.com/tutorials/DITA/index.html
A high-level intro:
* http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2005/10/going_dita.html
A short case study/interview:
* http://thecontentwrangler.com/article/astoria_softwares_move_to_dita_an_...
The new DITA 1.2 Spec has a lot of decent intro material in the Architecture section:
* http://dita.xml.org/standard
* (direct) http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/DITA1.2-spec.html
A very short and high-level intro to the architecture:
* http://dita.xml.org/dita101
An hour-long CAMTASIA video intro adapted from a recording of a live workshop Michael gave on DITA a few years ago - this is the first part, which has a high-level overview of DITA's history and capabilities:
* http://www.ditausers.org/tutorials/basics/Priestley_Intro/
DITA and Eclipse:
* http://dita.xml.org/dita-and-eclipse-powerful-combination (first half is about TaskModeler, an Eclipse-based DITA map editor - second half is on integrating DITA publishing with Eclipse)
Introduction to the DITA Open Toolkit from Robert Anderson, its lead architect:
* http://metadita.org/dita2007.html
DITA Project Starter Kit - A set of sample topics, a map, and ant scripts to get started or experiment with DITA
*http://dita.xml.org/blog/dita-project-starter-kit
General resources:
http://dita.xml.org/
OASIS's community web site for DITA. Has blogs, a Wiki, lists of adopters, vendors, presentations etc.
http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html
Robin Cover's list of DITA resources. Includes a lot of presentations, news, etc. in chronological order.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita
Official OASIS DITA Technical Committee site
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/OS/overview/overview.html
DITA 1.1 Specification overview - including links to architectural spec and language spec. The architectural spec in particular is designed to be generally readable, and although it does get very technical, it also includes a lot of introductory and explanatory material.
http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net
DITA Open Toolkit site - go through the intro PDF cited above before going here.
http://www.ditainfocenter.com
The architectural and language specs, plus the Open Toolkit User Guide in an online Help (Eclipse) format wioth index, search, and table of contents.
http://www.ditanews.com
Listing of 50 DITA Tools, dozens of presentations and tutorials, communities, conferences, mailing lists, and a monthly DITA Newsletter.
http://www.ditausers.org
The international community with personal online workspace folders, a web-based DITA Storm editor, and an online Open Toolkit. Author, build, and publish your first DITA Topics and DITA Maps without installiing anything.
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new beginners ressource
Tip: Easy command line processing with the DITA Open Toolkit
You don't need to know Ant to convert your DITA documents into a variety of output formats
Level: Introductory
http://dita.xml.org/tip-easy-command-line-processing-dita-open-toolkit should be added as beginner ressource.
Currently, following transtype (means the file format the transformation will be done to) is supported:
docbook, eclipsehelp, xhtml, eclipsecontent, javahelp,
htmlhelp, pdf, troff, wordrtf
For Linux:
The Dita OT Kit should be extracted to /home/YourAccountName/ *here*. Afterwards i.e. the ANT folder should be located at /home/YourAccountName/ant
You still have to grant the proper "All users" accessing rights to the startcmd.sh file. Probably you have to be sudo/root for doing this.
Launch the Dita OT Kit via double clicking:
/home/YourAccountName/startcmd.sh
Insert into one line:
java -jar lib/dost.jar /i:/home/YourAccountName/PathToYour/ditamaps-and-topic-subdirectories/hello_world.ditamap /transtype:pdf
The output can be found at:
home/YourAccountName/out/
For MS Windows:
The Dita OT Kit should be extracted to C:\ root drive.
Launch the Dita OT Kit via double clicking:
C:\DITA-OT1.4.1\startcmd.bat (Probably, the OT Kit version number will be different)
Insert into one line:
java -jar lib/dost.jar /i:C:/PathToYour/ditamaps-and-topic-subdirectories/hello_world.ditamap /transtype:pdf
The output can be found at:
C:\DITA-OT1.4.1\out or similar. (Probably, the OT Kit version number will be different.)
For MacOSX:
???
cheers,
Karl