DITA Open Toolkit <keyword keyref="release"/> Release Notes Release Notes DITA Open Toolkit is a feature release that provides new features and enhancements, including .

Requirements

Add info on new minimum Java version or any other requirements that have changed since previous release.

DITA-OT <keyword keyref="release"/> <!--<ph outputclass="small text-muted">released MMM d, yyyy</ph>-->

DITA Open Toolkit Release includes support for additional input resources, an alternative subcommand syntax for the dita command, and an initial preview of features for the latest draft of the upcoming DITA 2.0 standard.

DITA 2.0 preview

DITA-OT includes processing support for the latest DRAFT versions of the DITA 2.0 DTD and RelaxNG grammar files from OASIS (as of April 2020). #3449

  • #3453

  • #3440, #3462

  • #3463, #3482

  • #3464, #3465, #3479

  • #3483

New features --resource result.rewrite-rule.class result.rewrite-rule.xsl deliverables subcommand install subcommand plugins subcommand transtypes subcommand uninstall subcommand version subcommand

DITA-OT also includes the following new features:

  • You can now pass additional input resources to the dita command with the --resource option. #3412

    For example, to process a single topic file with a map that contains key definitions, use a command like this: dita --input=topic.dita --resource=keys.ditamap --format=

  • Two new parameters can be used to dynamically adjust the names and locations of output files in transformations that use the map-first pre-processing routine (preprocess2). #3413
    • Use result.rewrite-rule.class to rewrite filenames with a Java class
    • Use result.rewrite-rule.xsl to rewrite via an XSLT stylesheet

  • The dita command line interface has been refactored to support subcommands for common operations. #3437, #3492, #3494

    For syntax details, see .

    The double-hyphen option syntax has been retained for backwards compatibility, so if you use dita --install in scripts (or out of habit), it will still work. Each subcommand has its own --help option, so you can run dita install --help for details on the available arguments and options.

  • DITAVAL style tokens are now also generated as CSS classes that are added to the class attribute values in the generated HTML. #3489

    Rules with corresponding class selectors have been added to the default stylesheets to implement the same appearance that previous versions of DITA-OT achieved with inline styles. You can override these flagging styles if necessary using the following classes:

    • .flag__style--bold
    • .flag__style--italics
    • .flag__style--overline
    • .flag__style--underline
    • .flag__style--double-underline
Enhancements and changes

DITA Open Toolkit Release includes the following enhancements and changes to existing features:

  • The Java code has been refactored to generate xsl:message output using methods that are compatible with Saxon Enterprise Edition. #3383, #3452
  • Handling for UncheckedXPathException errors has been improved to provide more details on the source of the error including line and column information. #3395
  • The integration tests for the map-first preprocessing routine (preprocess2) have been separated from the previous preprocessing tests, with dedicated results defined to evaluate the compliance of map-first preprocessing with the expected output. #3425
  • The HTML5 plug-in includes new attribute sets for link lists that make it easier for custom plug-ins to add supplementary classes or other customizations without overriding entire templates. The default output includes the same CSS classes as previous versions of DITA-OT (relconcepts, relinfo, relref, reltasks), so existing customizations that rely on these classes will behave as expected. #3430
  • Various unused and deprecated Ant properties, list files, and targets have been removed from the preprocessing configuration. Recent DITA-OT versions provide alternative mechanisms to achieve the same results, such as the ditafileset element to select resources in the temporary directory. #3434
  • The org.dita.eclipsehelp plugin, which is still bundled with DITA-OT, is now installed from a separate repository. #3442
  • XSLT processing has been adjusted to use Saxon’s preferred Java API for XSLT, XQuery, XPath, and XML Schema processing (S9API) directly instead of the JAXP wrapper used by previous versions of DITA-OT. #3471
  • Java code has been refactored to use a single instance of XML utilities during processing. This approach allows other XML-related resources to be shared, including Saxon processors and name pools. #3473
Bugs

DITA Open Toolkit Release provides fixes for the following bugs:

  • The DITA 1.x specification defines cascade behaviors for maps such that othermeta and source do not cascade to child topicref elements. In earlier releases the mappull stage of processing pushed these to nested elements; that behavior is now corrected to match the specification. #1899, #3326
  • When coderef elements imported code samples with key references via the keyref attribute, earlier versions of DITA-OT appended the (temporary) file name of the referenced code sample to the last line of the parent codeblock element. Processing has been corrected to ensure that code blocks contain only the referenced code samples. #3232, #3496
  • To support additional resources, the mapref preprocessing stage now runs even if the input file is not a map. DITA-OT now checks whether maps with additional resources are available, even if they are not specified as input files. #3429
  • In some earlier releases, a call to an empty stub template for table summary attributes was dropped. Calls to that template have been restored, making it available for easy overrides. #3484
  • When key definitions with external scope were defined in maps in subdirectories, earlier versions treated absolute paths beginning with slashes as relative paths, and prefixed the name of the enclosing directory to the output path, resulting in broken links. Map reference processing has been corrected to ensure that absolute paths are recognized as such and passed to the output as intended. #3497
  • If term elements pointed to missing topics using the keyref attribute, earlier versions of DITA-OT would crash during the build process. An additional check has been implemented to catch these cases, allowing the build to finish and report errors for any unresolved term references. #3498
  • In HTML5 output, earlier versions of DITA-OT displayed the “Note” label when the type attribute of a note element was set to notice. Processing has been updated to ensure that the “Notice” label is correctly applied. #3502, #3503
  • In previous releases, when chunk was used to combine a branch of content, and a file within that branch was missing or invalid, processing within the chunk module could fail with a NullPointerException. This condition has been fixed, and processing will continue without the missing file. #3505
Contributors

DITA Open Toolkit Release includes by the following people:

NOTE: This lists contributions to the core toolkit, not docs.
  1. Jarno Elovirta
  2. Robert D Anderson
  3. Radu Coravu
  4. Roger Sheen
  5. Lionel Moizeau
  6. Stefan Weil

For the complete list of changes since the previous release, see the changelog on GitHub.

Documentation updates

The documentation for DITA Open Toolkit Release provides corrections and improvements to existing topics, along with new information in the following topics:

The topic hierarchy has been revised to promote information on common customization scenarios, including and , and how to extend the toolkit by and .

For additional information on documentation issues resolved in DITA Open Toolkit Release , see the milestone in the documentation repository.

DITA Open Toolkit Release includes by the following people:

NOTE: This lists contributions to docs, not to the core toolkit.
  1. Roger Sheen
  2. Robert D Anderson
  3. Jarno Elovirta
  4. Shane Taylor
  5. Lief Erickson
  6. Heston Hoffman

For the complete list of documentation changes since the previous release, see the changelog.