DITA-OT Day 2017
Panel: What's next for DITA-OT?
Jarno Elovirta, Robert Anderson, Roger Fienhold Sheen, George Bina
What are we missing? Where would you like to see us go?
This is a feedback session where we want to hear from you! One problem with DITA-OT development is that
we don't usually know what our customers like most, what they're using, and (almost as important) what they're
not using. It's also likely that in some cases, we're not sure what to ask. In this session we'll discuss
potential ways of getting this feedback, related issues such as data privacy, and ideally take suggestions from
the audience for improved communication.
Jarno Elovirta and Robert Anderson
DCQL - the Dita Cascading Query Language
Short overview of the DCQL attribute domain and accompanying code that allows pulling DITA content in
from SQL or XML databases at publish time or runtime, and even keeping the data link alive on interactive media.
Jang Graat
Locale-Aware Sorting and Text Handling in the Open Toolkit
Presents the DITA Community i18n Plugin, which provides an integration with the ICU4J libraries. The
i18n plugin provides support for locale-specific grouping and sorting, including dictionary-based Simplified
Chinese, as well as facilities for doing locale-specific word and line breaking.
Eliot Kimber
Automatically Create Targeted Review Docs for your SMEs
This presentation illustrates how an OT plugin can leverage CMS status information to create a PDF for
review that includes only the content SMEs need to look at, or alternatively, include everything for full
context but highlight the specific content that needs reviewing. This presentation demonstrates how to quickly
create a PDF that includes material for a specific reviewer, and how to create a PDF intended for multiple
reviewers with their names assigned to each topic.
Leigh White
Bootstrapping DITA - Customizing HTML output for modern web frameworks
Web developers often use CSS frameworks, HTML5 boilerplate or component libraries like Bootstrap or
Foundation to quickly build robust, responsive sites. With custom HTML plug-ins, DITA-OT can be extended to
produce HTML5 output that makes use of these common templates so that generated documents can build on existing
front-end solutions. This talk will outline the process, using the DITA-OT project website at dita-ot.org as an
example.
Roger Fienhold Sheen
Using CSS to style the PDF output
Using CSS to produce PDF from DITA content is way easier than writing plugins and customizing XSLT
stylesheet and will probably become in the future the most used way to produce a PDF. We will go over the
existing solutions for producing PDF from DITA using CSS and maybe try to show a little bit of the CSS
pagination standard: change the front matter and backmatter, change headers and footers, change some colors and
styles, change the paper type and orientation.
Radu Coravu
Markdown support inside-out
Description of how Markdown support was added to DITA-OT to make Markdown a first-class file format for
DITA content. Focus is on the implementation details and goals instead of Markdown author
perspective.
Jarno Elovirta
DITA-OT Docs Development(s)
This talk provides an overview of DITA-OT documentation usage metrics and highlights recent changes to
the docs and ideas for future improvements. We’ll close with room for suggestions from the community and a call
for contributions with information on the browser-based workflow for suggesting changes.
Roger Fienhold Sheen
Managing a large scale build environment with 50+ custom plugins
Tips and tricks, mistakes made, and lessons learned: how IBM manages a single build environment for
hundreds of authors with 50+ plugins -- including new doctypes, new transform types, and externally contributed
plugins -- while keeping up with the latest DITA-OT releases.
Robert Anderson
Generating SVG syntax diagrams with plugins for all output formats
DITA includes a lot of markup for syntax diagrams, but it's not particularly useful without a way to
render the diagrams. Many years ago Deborah Pickett wrote a group of plugins to render those diagrams as SVG,
but they were tied to the "html+" transform type and required an obsolete version of DITA-OT. Last year IBM
extracted the SVG diagram feature from those plugins, brought it up to date, and made it usable by other formats
(including PDF and EPUB). This session will give an overview of Deborah's original plugins, and explain how
anybody can use the updated versions with the latest DITA-OT.
Robert Anderson
DITA Validation and spell-checking
Jason will discuss and demonstrate how HERE Technologies extends DITA-OT using open-sourced plugins to
continuously validate and build technical documentation. See: https://github.com/heremaps/dita-ot-plugins for
more details. The discussion will cover the design and evolution of the plugins, interaction with end users and
how you can integrate the plugins in your own workflows, as well as expected future developments.
Jason Fox
Accessibility in DITA-OT
Not only is accessible content often mandatory, it's also just a good idea -- assuming you want your
content available to as many readers as possible. This session provides an overview of the accessibility
features in output generated by the DITA-OT. While many features are automated thanks to the semantic nature of
DITA elements, others rely on you to make sure your content includes everything it needs to. While going over
these features, we will explain how DITA-OT handles your content, while also giving tips for how to ensure your
content reaches users on all sorts of devices.
Robert Anderson
We shall call it preprocess2
Overview of preprocess2, the replacement module for the original preprocessing routines. This session
explains the new approach, why we developed it, and why should you care.
Jarno Elovirta
DITA-OT
A quick announcement about the DITA-OT project.
Robert Anderson