DITA Open Toolkit logo

DITA Open Toolkit

The open-source publishing engine for content authored in the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

DITA-OT Day - Helsinki 2024
February 11, 2024
Helsinki, Finland

Features

DITA Open Toolkit is a publishing tool used to process DITA content and convert it to other formats.

Learn more »

Download

Install DITA Open Toolkit for structured authoring, topic-based writing and cross-media publishing workflows.

Download DITA-OT 4.2.1

Docs

The DITA Open Toolkit docs provide information about running, configuring and extending the toolkit.

Read the docs »


Open source. Free as a bird.

While the DITA standard is owned and developed by OASIS, the DITA Open Toolkit project is governed separately.

DITA Open Toolkit is a vendor-independent, open-source implementation of the DITA standard, released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The toolkit supports all versions of the OASIS DITA specification, including 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3.

As of Release 3.0, DITA-OT also provides support for Markdown, and the alternative authoring formats proposed for Lightweight DITA. XML input and lightweight markup formats can be combined in a single map file and converted to a variety of different output formats.

The DITA Open Toolkit project welcomes contributions from the community. The project depends heavily on the dedication of a small group of contributors, most of whom work on the project in their spare time.

If you use DITA Open Toolkit to publish XML content, we hope you’ll consider contributing to the project in any way you can.

DITA logo

Output formats. Out of the box.

The toolkit’s extensible plug-in mechanism allows you to add your own transformations and customize the default output, including:

  • HTML – HTML5 and XHTML output are supported with a variety of HTML-based navigation types. The HTML output contains class values based on the DITA elements for styling via CSS.

  • PDF – PDF output is generated from XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) via an open-source formatter (Apache FOP) or commercial tools such as Antenna House Formatter or RenderX XEP.

  • Markdown – Along with Markdown input, DITA-OT now provides new output formats to convert DITA content to the original Markdown syntax, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, and GitBook.

  • Normalized DITA – The DITA-to-DITA transformation resolves map references, keys, content references, and code references for troubleshooting or post-processing with other systems.

  • Eclipse Help – Eclipse output is an HTML-based format that also produces navigation and index files for use with Eclipse information centers.

  • HTML Help – Microsoft Compiled HTML Help output produces a compiled help (.chm) file with HTML topics, table of contents, and index.

Output formats

DITA infrastructure. Publishing power.

DITA Open Toolkit provides an extensible publishing engine that serves as the foundation of the software ecosystem that enables DITA workflows.

Many of the best-known XML editors, enterprise authoring solutions and commercial content management systems rely on DITA-OT to publish XML content, including:

For PDF output, DITA-OT generates XSL Formatting Objects from DITA content. The interim XSL-FO format is passed to an FO processor like the open-source Apache™ FOP (included with DITA-OT) or a commercial solution such as Antenna House Formatter or RenderX XEP, which renders the final PDF.

To add your company to this list, create an issue or open a pull request.

Publishing platform