Support for multiple file extensions in one DITA map

DITA Open Toolkit supports two different file extensions, ".dita" and ".xml". Previous releases of DITA Open Toolkit did not support the transformation of DITA maps containing inconsistent file types, for example one DITA map containing both .dita and .xml files. This made file reuse difficult, because you had to change the file extensions manually.

In the 1.3 release, you can include both .xml and .dita as the file extensions in a single DITA map.

If you include both .xml and .dita files in one DITA map, and specify /ditaext:.dita in the Java command, the .xml files are transformed to .dita and put in the temp directory together with the .dita files. If you specify /ditaext:.xml in the Java command, all the .dita files are transformed to .xml in the temp directory.

The default process option is to change all files into .xml files.

Note:

Do not include files with the same root name but different extensions in the same directory, because this might cause unexpected problems.
Error messages and warning messages in the console might not reflect the real extension. For example, if there is incorrect usage in file a.dita, the warning message in the console might refer to file a.xml, because file a.dita was changed into file a.xml in the temp directory.
If you use other file extensions together with .dita and .xml in one ditamap, for example, .dit, you run the risk of transformation failure.