Download

Important Changes for DITA-OT 1.2.2

There are some changes to the behavior of paths in release 1.3 base on the SourceForge Patch #1326450 "Make ${basedir} mine".

Now, basedir can be specified to other places base on needs, and input, output, and temp paths are based on the basedir if they are relative.

In the sample ant scripts provided in the toolkit's 'ant' directory, the default value of 'basedir' was changed to the current directory, which used to point to the toolkit's root direcoty. Base on the design, 'temp', 'out' directories are now generated into the current directory by default.

For detail information on this design change, please refer to http://dita.xml.org/node/1281.

Important Changes for DITA-OT 1.2

DITA-OT 1.2 provides two significant new features: an error handling and logging system and a plug-in capability for new transforms and specializations.

To learn about other changes in this release, refer to the release notes for the package. The known imitations for this release are documented at Known Limitations.

Error handling and logging system

Many users have mentioned the difficulty of finding the significant messages among the many informative messages that are generated by the DITA processing pipeline. The error handling and logging system allows you to collect and filter the messages at the end of the processing run, rather than having to watch a steady stream of messages go by on the screen.

Because the new error handling and logging system is mandatory for the Java command line, you must add lib/dost.jar to the CLASSPATH Environment Variable.

If you invoke your transformation by using an ant script, you must also add a new parameter in your Ant invocation to turn on the error handling and logging. For example, instead of using just ant -f ant\sample_xhtml.xml to start a transformation, use ant -f ant\sample_xhtml.xml -logger org.dita.dost.log.DITAOTBuildLogger , which will additionally turn on the error handler and logger.

DITA-OT 1.2 Plug-ins

Starting with DITA-OT 1.2, a plug-in capability has been introduced which allows new specializations or output transforms to be added into the toolkit independently of the core development schedule. Several different offerings have been provided as introductory plug-in capabilities of DITA-OT. You can select and download the plug-in you need by going to the DITA-OT download page and looking for the new "Plug-ins" category. Then read further on how to install and use the plugin. Any dependencies for plug-ins will be documented in the release notes for each plug-in.

At the time of DITA-OT 1.2 release, the following plug-ins are available for download:

Plug-in

Purpose

API Reference Specialization

The API Reference specialization provides a general-purpose basis for documenting callable programming libraries. The design of API Reference is based loosely on the principle objects from the eCore metamodel of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The API Reference can used to create basic API documentation or can be specialized for a programming language or library type to make it easier to write complete and accurate documentation for such libraries. The Java API Reference provides an example of how to extend the API Reference specialization for the libraries of a specific programming language.

Java API Reference Specialization

The Java API Reference specialization provides a basis for documenting Java class libraries. The specialization can be used or examined as an example of how to extend the base API Reference specialization.

Taxonomy Specialization

The Taxonomy (thesaurus) specialization defines formal subjects and the relationships between those subjects so you can classify what your content is about. For a more detailed explanation, see the article at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita10/.

Idiom's FO transformation

Idiom Technologies has donated its production quality PDF output for use with the DITA Open Toolkit. This has been integrated into the Toolkit as a plugin. Features of this code include:

• Index (with extensions) and table of contents generation
• Font mapping: characters can be remapped to different fonts. This is particularly useful for CJK font support, and is configured per-locale.
• Extensive customization of publishing output by setting variables (67 of them) and attribute-sets (391 of them).
• A catalog-based customization framework where you can customize variables, attribute-sets and XSLs without modifying Open Toolkit code: your custom settings live in files in a separate customization hierarchy.
• Bookmap/bookinfo support (DITA 1.0 level).