Localizing in PDF2 output targets

Overview of how translation works for PDF2 processing

For PDF2 output (using the Idiom plug-in), the locale is set globally for the entire PDF output file. In order to translate the PDF output to another language, it is necessary to translate text in the individual DITA topic files and to cause the DITA Open Toolkit to translate any character strings it places in the PDF output, such as the string "Contents".

Setting the document.locale property in ./demo/fo/build.xml

The property ./demo/fo/build.xml sets the locale for the PDF2 output file. When the plug-in is installed, it is hard-coded to "en_US". Several locales are supported. They are:
  • de_DE
  • en_US
  • es_ES
  • fr_FR
  • it_IT
  • ja_JP
  • zh_CN

For example, setting the locale like the following example will produce German strings in the PDF output file:

<property name="document.locale" value="en_US" />

PDF2 localization examples

The following figure shows a page from a PDF2 output file where the (default) locale of US English was specified:

If we change the locale to German, the same page looks like the this:

Parent topic: Localizing (translating) your DITA content