DITA Open Toolkit Developer Reference
The Developer Reference is designed to provide more advanced information about
the DITA-OT. It is geared to an audience that needs information about the DITA-OT architecture, extending the
DITA-OT, and creating DITA-OT plug-ins.
Architecture of the DITA Open Toolkit The DITA Open Toolkit is an open-source implementation of the OASIS specification for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The toolkit uses Ant, XSLT, and Java to transform DITA content (maps and topics) into different deliverable formats.Extending the DITA Open Toolkit There are several methods that can be used to extend the toolkit; not all of them are recommended or supported. The best way to create most extensions is with a plug-in; extended documentation for creating plug-ins is provided in the next section.Creating plug-ins You can use DITA-OT plug-ins to extend the DITA Open Toolkit.Extension points The DITA Open Toolkit provides a series of extension points that can be used to integrate changes into the core code. Extension points are defined in the plugin.xml file for each plug-in. When plug-ins are installed, the DITA-OT makes each extension visible to the rest of the toolkit.Customizing HTML output There are several ways to customize the default HTML output. You can easily adjust the look and feel just by setting parameters and adding custom CSS, or create plug-ins for more complex customizations.Customizing PDF output You can create custom DITA-OT plug-ins that build on the default DITA to PDF transformation. Plug-ins can customize covers and page layouts, modify formatting, override logic of the default PDF plug-in, and much more.Migrating customizations If you have XSL transformation overrides, plug-ins or other customizations written prior to DITA-OT 2.5 , you may need to make changes to ensure your overrides work properly with the latest toolkit versions. Java API DITA-OT 2.5 includes a new Java Application Programming Interface to allow developers to embed DITA-OT more easily into other Java programs.