๐Ÿ–จ๏ธ DITA to PDF with Eclipse๏ƒ

Overview๏ƒ

This program runs inside Eclipse, an integrated development environment (IDE) and is mainly a Java based project in that all the code libraries use Java (Apache FOP, Saxon, DITA Open Toolkit, Apache ANT) and it also uses XSL and XML heavily. Development was originally done in oXygen XML Editor then ported to Eclipse. Java is now ranked first on the TIOBE Index.

This project takes DITA XML as input and transforms it to PDF with the DITA Open Toolkit and a custom-made plugin using Apache Ant. Using PDF allows us to print a nicely formatted documents on paper. Using Eclipse generating the PDF output can be done in one click by building the project and this creates a publishing pipeline making all the different PDFโ€™s one after the other.

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML data model for authoring and using DITA-OT you can publish those ideas. The DITA standard is maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. Some of the largest and most successful companies in the world use DITA. The next link is an informal list of companies using DITA.

The Roadmap for this project is to make this into an easy to follow tutorial on how to build and customize DITA-OT PDF plugins and publish your DITA content using Eclipse. I am currently using DITA-OT 2.2.2 and I am aiming at keeping the โ€˜info.debriefโ€™ plugin compatible with the current version of DITA-OT.

How DITA-OT PDF Plugins work๏ƒ

Plugins are placed in the DITA-OT plugins directory. You can see the plugin I built in this directory named โ€˜info.debriefโ€™ and the auto built vanilla plugin named โ€˜sampleโ€™.

When ready a plugin must be integrated into DITA-OT using Apache Ant. I built this project using OS X and I installed Ant through Homebrew.

To integrate a new plugin on the command line from inside the root DITA-OT folder it would be -> ant -f integrator.xml

You can also run the integrator inside Eclipse as an Ant build by right clicking on โ€˜/libs/dita-ot-2.2.2/integrator.xmlโ€™ and selecting -> Run As -> Ant Build and this should integrate the plugin with the toolkit.

Every plugin has a โ€˜transtypeโ€™ -> the two transtypeโ€™s are โ€˜debriefโ€™ and โ€˜sampleโ€™

PDF Plugins are comprised of some XML config files, some artwork and some custom XSL (XSLT/XSL-FO/XPath) code DITA-OT provides that base XSL code that you โ€˜overrideโ€™ with your custom work.

The two main files that configure plugins are plugin.xml and integrator.xml which should be in the root of the plugin folder. The โ€˜cfgโ€™ folder contains the rest of the customization.

Custom XSL can be placed in two XSL files both named custom.xsl. I placed all the custom code at โ€˜libs/dita-ot-2.2.2/plugins/info.debrief/cfg/fo/xsl/custom.xslโ€™ for this project. The other file is seen in the adjacent โ€˜attrsโ€™ directory.

Placing the custom code only in these two files follows best practice techniques on how to build a DITA-OT PDF plugin.

List of resources and technologies used on this GitHub project๏ƒ

Eclipse - https://eclipse.org/

The Apache Software Foundation - http://www.apache.org/

Apache FOP - https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

Apache ANT - http://ant.apache.org

Saxon XSLT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_XSLT

Saxon - http://saxon.sourceforge.net/

Saxonica - http://www.saxonica.com/welcome/welcome.xml

Online community for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture OASIS Standard - http://dita.xml.org/

DITA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture

DITA-Open Toolkit - http://www.dita-ot.org/

W3C - The Extensible Stylesheet Language Family (XSL) - http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/

W3C XSLT 2.0 - http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/

XSL Formatting Objects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects

XSL-FO Processors - http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/wiki/XSL-FO_Processors

XML - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

Adobe PDF - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OASIS_(organization)

oXygen XML Editor - http://www.oxygenxml.com

DITA-OT installing plugins - http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/1.7/dev_ref/plugins-installing.html

Generate sample DITA-OT plugin - https://dita-generator.elovirta.com/

Creating DITA-OT plugins - http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/1.5.4/dev_ref/plugins-overview.html

Customizing PDF output - http://www.dita-ot.org/1.8/readme/dita2pdf-customization.html

Homebrew โ€” The missing package manager for OS X - http://brew.sh/

Apache Ant Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Ant

Install Ant with Homebrew - https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ant#default

Installing Apache Ant - http://ant.apache.org/manual/install.html

Codecademy - Learn the Command Line - https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-the-command-line

Codecademy - Learn Java - https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-java

Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git? https://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1

Ruby regular expression editor - http://rubular.com/

Essential programmer training - http://www.codewars.com/

Mastering Markdown - https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/

GitHub Desktop - https://desktop.github.com/

Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier - https://web.archive.org/web/20200728195620/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11533

TechSmith Camtasia - https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html

MD5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

sha1sum - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha1sum

IDE - Integrated Development Environment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment

Git (software) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software) man page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

Terminal (OS X) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(OS_X)