The DITA specification is silent on how to transform 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. Usually people want more from the output: they want it to be more attractive or conform to their corporate look and feel (or both).

This session introduces the changes you can make to the DITA OT to customize output for your needs. These changes include modifying OT CSS files, adding static and dynamic headers and footers, enhancing XSL transforms, and creating simple element-level specializations. Along the way, the session covers the organization of the DITA OT and describes how to create a DITA plug-in to make your modifications portable. The discussion focuses on getting things running quickly, but also describes strategies for making an implementation more robust and easy to distribute.

This session focuses on the general DITA OT concepts with an emphasis on XHTML output.

Viewers should be familiar with XHTML (including CSS) and XML; a basic understanding of XSL is useful.

Windows Media file (111 MB, 86 minutes)