Preview support for Lightweight DITA Lightweight DITA DITA-OT provides preview support for the authoring formats proposed for , or “LwDITA”. The XDITA, MDITA and HDITA formats are alternative representations of DITA content in XML, Markdown and HTML5. topicref format authoring formatsLightweight DITA metadataLightweight DITA DITA 1.3Lightweight DITA Since has not yet been released as a formal specification, the implementation for XDITA, MDITA and HDITA authoring formats is subject to change. Future versions of DITA Open Toolkit will be updated as LwDITA evolves.
XDITA

XDITA is the LwDITA authoring format that uses XML to structure information. XDITA is a subset of DITA, with new multimedia element types added to support interoperability with HTML5. XDITA is designed for users who want to write DITA content but who do not want (or need) the full power of DITA.

The XDITA parser included in the org.lwdita plug-in provides preliminary support for XDITA maps and XDITA topics.

To apply XDITA-specific processing to topics in an XDITA map or a full DITA 1.3 map, set the format attribute on a topicref to xdita:

<map> <topicref href="xdita-topic.xml" format="xdita"/> </map>

For examples of cross-format content sharing between topics in XDITA, HDITA, extended-profile MDITA, and DITA 1.3, see the LwDITA sample files in the DITA-OT installation directory under plugins/org.oasis-open.xdita.v0_2_2/samples.
MDITA

MDITA is the LwDITA authoring format based on Markdown. It is designed for users who want to write structured content with the minimum of overhead, but who also want to take advantage of the reuse mechanisms associated with the DITA standard and the multi-channel publishing afforded by standard DITA tooling.

Recent proposals for LwDITA include two profiles for authoring MDITA topics:

The Markdown DITA parser included in the org.lwdita plug-in provides preliminary support for these profiles and additional Markdown constructs as described in the syntax reference.

To apply LwDITA-specific processing to Markdown topics, set the format attribute to mdita:

<map> <topicref href="mdita-topic.md" format="mdita"/> </map>

In this case, the first paragraph in the topic will be treated as a short description, for example, and additional metadata can be specified for the topic via a YAML front matter block.

Setting the format attribute to mdita triggers stricter parsing than the more lenient document parsing approach that is applied to markdown documents. The MDITA map format is not yet supported. To include Markdown content in publications, use an XDITA map or a DITA 1.3 map.
HDITA

HDITA is the LwDITA authoring format based on HTML5, which is intended to support structured content authoring with tools designed for HTML authoring. HDITA also uses custom data attributes to provide interoperability with DITA.

The HDITA parser included in the org.lwdita plug-in provides preliminary support for these constructs.

To apply LwDITA-specific processing to HTML topics, set the format attribute to hdita:

<map> <topicref href="hdita-topic.html" format="hdita"/> </map>

The HDITA map format is not yet supported. To include HDITA content, use an XDITA map or a DITA 1.3 map.