Table of contents

Abstract

Hacking vs. elegance

DITA OT Overview

CSS changes

HTML headers and footers

Modifying XSL transforms

Packaging up your overrides

Hacking and specialization

Summary

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 white paper 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.

 

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