FREE! Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) defines a set of XML elements for creating and organizing content. However, the DITA specification is silent on transforming DITA into user-readable documentation. The DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) fills that gap, providing a mechanism for transforming DITA content into multiple output formats, including HTML and PDF. The DITA OT formatting for both of these formats is basic, at best. This paper focuses on the changes you can make to the DITA OT HTML output to create attractive output. These modifications include changes to cascading stylesheets (CSS), headers and footers, and more advanced customizations. The paper also illustrates how you can create content-specific elements through DITA specialization.

NOTE: The information in this reference covers increasingly complex changes to the DITA OT. Depending on the types of changes you decide to make, your skills should encompass these areas: XHTML (including CSS), XSLT, Ant, and XML DTDs.

19 pages.

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Page 1 (PDF format, 165 KB)

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