Evaluating the DITA Open Toolkit (Full Easy Install)

Unzip or extract the "full_easy_install" zip file to a convenient directory, such as your C: drive's root directory. The package will create a directory such as C:\DITA-OT\ that contains not only the usual Toolkit materials but also all the run-time components needed to run the Toolkit in a basic evaluation mode.

Browse over to this new directory and double-click on the startcmd.bat file in that directory. A new Command Prompt window will open up, with the environment variables already set to enable the Toolkit to run within that shell.

At the command prompt (usually C:\DITA-OT\ for this version), type "ant samples.web -f build_demo.xml". After a series of processing messages, there should be a new out\ directory in the DITA-OT\ directory that contains a folder with the resulting HTML output in it. Congratulations on creating your first example of DITA output!

Now try the full set of transforms from a single command: ant all -f build_demo.xml. This command will process DITA samples in the toolkit into many of the supported output types for the Toolkit. After a much longer flurry of messages, the out\ directory should have a number of folders in it, each with several deliverables produced by the Toolkit demos. If you happen to have the Microsoft Compiled HTML Help Workshop or the JavaHelp toolset installed for other work you have done with User Assistance, you might even get ready-to use CHM and JavaHelp output files. By comparing the outputs with the various source materials in the distribution, you can get an idea about how the processing works.

Demo targets

Here are the individual demo targets that you can try while evaluating the DITA Open Toolkit. Note that most are subcomponents of larger operations—you can use any of these individually.

Earlier releases also contained demo targets for building the DITA 1.1 Language Specification, but that was removed in DITA-OT 1.5.2 because it was superseded by the DITA 1.2 specification.

all: Build all output
doc: Build the documentation
doc.articles.chm: Build the articles of dita to Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
doc.articles.pdf: Build the articles of dita to PDF
doc.articles.web: Build the articles of dita to XHTML
docbook: Transform the samples to DocBook
prompt: Prompt to build anything
samples: Build the sample output
samples.eclipse: Build the samples for Eclipse
samples.htmlhelp: Build the samples for Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
samples.javahelp: Build the samples for JavaHelp
samples.pdf: Build the samples as PDF
samples.troff: Build the samples as troff
samples.web: Build the samples to XHTML
clean: Delete all output
clean.doc: Remove the documentation output
clean.doc.articles: Delete the articles directory in doc.
clean.docbook: Remove the docbook output
clean.samples: Remove the sample output
clean.samples.eclipse: Remove the sample Eclipse output
clean.samples.htmlhelp: Remove the sample Microsoft Compiled HTML Help output
clean.samples.javahelp: Remove the sample JavaHelp output
clean.samples.pdf: Remove the sample PDF output
clean.samples.web: Remove the sample XHTML output

If you do not specify a target for build_demo.xml, the default target is prompt.

You can also try your hand at modifying some of the sample scripts in the ant directory. These represent the kind of driver files that you would create for your own projects. You can easily adapt these to process your own test DITA files, for example. Call the other Ant samples after this example:

C:\DITA-OT>ant -f samples\ant_sample\sample_xhtml.xml

This is basically the same as running ant samples.web -f build_demo.xml, but intended for you to modify.

You will find the output for this exercise in the samples/ant_sample/ directory itself. You can add parameters to the sample_xhtml.xml file to change where your outputs end up, and also to modify the build process in other ways. See the documentation for Ant parameters to learn more about processing options.