DITA Open Toolkit

Single-Source Publishing with DITA Open Toolkit

DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) is an Open Source solution to automatically render DITA source data into multiple target formats including PDF, HTML5 and various office and help formats. Layouts can be freely influenced using standards like XSL-FO, XSLT and CSS. DITA is mainly aimed at Technical Documentation in the sense of manuals or online help, but there are several extensions to enable specialized markups for training material and other applications.

DITA and DITA-OT do not necessarily require a CCMS or PIM back-end, but due to the very modular character of real-world DITA data (a manual can easily contain more than 1,000 modules plus images) managing such data in the file system is practically impossible, not to speak of how to handle versioning, release cycles, translation and variant management. Thus, using DITA is practically linked to using a CCMS or in some cases, a PIM for organizing the DITA source data.