DITA-OT Day 2019
DITA-OT Shop Talk
Join us for an inside view of the DITA Open Toolkit project workshop: Who’s on duty; what’s on the
workbench; shavings, chips, and sawdust on the cutting room floor; management negotiations with union
representatives; annual guild membership drive, and a few ideas for what comes next.
Robert Anderson, Roger Sheen, Jarno Elovirta, George Bina
Easy as pie PDF customizations using CSS
CSS can be used to produce quality PDF and using CSS to style the PDF output is much easier than using
XSLT stylesheets. We'll explore various scenarios (changing fonts, changing the paper size, rotating pages,
flagging content) and see how easily this can be done using CSS.
Radu Coravu
Generating metrics from your DITA project
The DITA Map Metrics Report plugin can be used to generate all kinds of interesting metrics from your
DITA project. We'll explore what the plugin can offer and then use the plugin to build graphics which show
metrics evolve between various versions of the user's manual.
Radu Coravu
Case Study of Taxonomy and Search for DITA-OT
The DITA-OT website was the case study organization for my master's thesis. In this session we'll talk
about what data and metrics influenced the taxonomy used to create the index, how Subject Scheme is used to
control @outputclass values, how Algolia DocSearch is causing findability problems, and recommendations for
improvements.
Lief Erickson
Documentation Developments
This talk provides an overview of recent changes to the DITA-OT documentation and project website,
points out open issues, highlights ideas for future improvements, and closes with room for suggestions from the
community and a call for contributions.
Roger Fienhold Sheen
The Art of doing nothing
Standard DITA-OT pre-processing assumes that all input files are of a processable format (e.g. DITA
topics, lwDITA, hDITA etc). This session demonstrates the use of a series of DITA-OT pass-through plugins, which
avoid DITA-OT pre-processing and extend possible input formats for chapters and topics to a wider range of
standard documentation formats used by developers and non-technical experts (e.g. Word documents, Swagger
specifications, Postman collections etc.):1) fox.jason.passthrough, 2) fox.jason.passthrough.pandoc, 3)
fox.jason.passthrough.swagger
Jason Fox
All the cool kids are using the Cloud
Demonstration of two new DITA-OT transforms showing how to create novel XML-based intermediate outputs
and consume cloud-based services. The two new transforms cover DITA-to-speech and intelligent natural language
translation of text based on semantic DITA markup:1) fox.jason.audiobook, 2)
fox.jason.translate.xliff
Jason Fox
All the cool kids are using JavaScript
Demonstration of a series of DITA-OT plugins combining the use of JavaScript with ANT and XSLT. An
architectural discussion on how to design, test and integrate JavaScript-based functions within DITA-OT Plugins
and how to split the code between different programming languages and appropriate use of extension points. The
plugins include a syntax-highlighter and a DITA prettifier:1) fox.jason.splash, 2) fox.jason.prismjs, 3)
fox.jason.readthedocs, 4) fox.jason.pretty-dita
Jason Fox
Editing DITA Open Toolkit Project files
DITA Open Toolkit project files can store the entire set of main DITA Maps, output formats and
parameters necessary for publishing your DITA project. We'll explore how an XML editing tool can provide
editing, validation and publishing support for the project file.
George Bina
One file to rule them all (DITA Project)
DITA-OT 3.4 introduces support for project files to define reusable input context and publications. We
discuss why the feature was developed, how to use them and in the darkness bind them.
Jarno Elovirta
AH-WML DITA-to-Word Plug-in
AH-WML is a DITA-OT plug-in that generates Microsoft Word Document (.docx) from DITA contents. It is a
work in progress, but it already supports multiple image formats (GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, EMF, SVG (Word 2016 or
later)), CALS table rendering, and several standard DITA elements (<p>, <ul>, <ol>,
<dl>, <pre>).
Tony Graham
Various useful Open source plugins to enhance DITA publishing
The DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine has support for plugins which can be installed to customize or
enhance the publishing process. In time Syncro Soft (the company which produces Oxygen XML Editor) has developed
and made open source lots of small plugins which can be installed in the publishing engine. I will be presenting
small examples in order to show case what each plugin in the Oxygen XML GitHub organization does and maybe give
you ideas about how you could use these open source plugins on your side.
Radu Coravu
Running on someone else’s computer
Description and demo of how to deploy DITA-OT on AWS, using Batch, Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway
to run the process and orchestrate the deployment with CDK.
Jarno Elovirta
Trim your toolkit with this one weird trick!
DITA-OT has now been under development for over fifteen years. If you started customizing DITA-OT with
the first release to support plug-ins, even those plug-ins could be over a decade old. So what should we all be
doing to keep our tools clean? In this session, we will talk about how DITA-OT has grown: a brief history of how
we got where we are, past efforts to handle technical debt, what we all might do to help make it easier to
manage (or get rid of) that debt.
Robert Anderson
News and Announcements
DITA-OT Day team