Plug-in applications
Plug-ins allow you to extend the functionality of DITA-OT. This might entail adding support for specialized
document types, integrating processing overrides, or defining new output transformations.
Extending an XML catalog file You can update either the main DITA-OT XML catalog or the XML catalog that is used by the PDF plug-in. This enables DITA-OT to support new specializations and document-type shells.Adding a new target to the Ant build process As of DITA-OT 3.0, the ant.import extension point can be used to make new targets available to the Ant processing pipeline. This can be done as part of creating a new transformation, extending pre-processing, or simply to make new Ant targets available to other plug-ins.Adding an Ant target to the pre-processing pipeline You can add an Ant target to the pre-processing pipeline. This enables you to insert additional processing before or after the pre-processing chain or a specific step in the pre-processing operation.Adding a new transformation type Plug-ins can add an entirely new transformation type. The new transformation type can be very simple, such as an HTML build that creates an additional control file; it also can be very complex, adding any number of new processing steps.Overriding an XSLT-processing step You can override specific XSLT-processing steps in both the pre-processing pipeline and certain DITA-OT transformations.Referencing files from other plug-ins Starting with DITA-OT 1.5.4, you can use the plugin:plugin-id URI extension and the ${dita.plugin.plugin-id .dir} Ant variable to reference the base path of another installed DITA-OT plug-in.Adding parameters to existing XSLT steps You can pass parameters from the Ant build to existing XSLT steps in both the pre-processing pipeline and certain DITA-OT transformations. This can be useful if you want to make the parameters available as global <xsl:param> values within XSLT overrides.Adding a Java library to the DITA-OT classpath You can use the dita.conductor.lib.import extension point to add an additional Java library to the DITA-OT classpath parameter.Adding new diagnostic messages Use the dita.xsl.messages extension point to add plug-in-specific messages to the diagnostic messages that are generated by DITA-OT. These messages then can be used by any XSLT override.Creating a new plug-in extension point If your plug-in needs to define its own extension point in an XML file, add the string "_template" to the filename before the file suffix. When the plug-in is installed, this file will be processed like the built-in DITA-OT templates.Adding Saxon customizations Plug-ins can contribute XSLT extension functions and collation URI resolvers. These customizations are automatically configured to work with Saxon when transformations are run using the DITA-OT <pipeline> task with custom XSLT.