Globalization support The DITA Open Toolkit offers globalization support in the following areas: Generated text, index sorting, and bi-directional text.

Generated text

Generated text is text that is rendered automatically in the output that is generated by the DITA-OT; this text is not located in the DITA source files. The following are examples of generated text:

• The word "Chapter" in a PDF file.
• The phrases "Related concepts," "Related tasks," and "Related reference" in HTML output.

Index sorting

The DITA-OT can use only a single language to sort indexes.What does the ICU for Java provide? Does index sorting occur if ICU for Java is NOT installed?

Bi-directional text

The DITA-OT contains style sheets (CSS files) that support both left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) languages in HTML based transformations. PDF supports both LTR and RTL rendering based on the document language. The dir attribute can be used to override the default rendering direction.

When the DITA-OT generates output, it takes the first value for the xml:lang attribute that it encounters, and then it uses that value to create generated text, perform index sorting, and determine which default CSS file is used. If no value for the xml:lang attribute is found, the toolkit defaults to US English. You can use the configuration.properties to change the default language.