Getting Started with PDF Publishing from the DITA Open Toolkit

So you’ve got some DITA content. Great! Now how do you turn it into a nice PDF with your corporate look-and-feel? The DITA Open Toolkit is free, and that always has a huge appeal, but it’s not exactly user-friendly. You don’t have to be a programmer to use it, but it helps to know where to start. This workshop is in three parts. Using some sample content, we’ll set up a ditamap and bookmap. Next, we’ll create an ANT build file to kick off the whole publishing process. Finally, we’ll work through a few simple stylesheet changes that can serve as an example of the things you can do to customize your PDF output. While this workshop just scratches the surface, it will demystify the Open Toolkit and provide you with enough understanding of the basics to continue working on your own. You’re encouraged to bring a laptop (with the DITA Open Tooklit installed) so you can work along with the demos. If you just prefer to watch, that’s fine too.

[Suggestion: Consider first attending Down the Rabbit Hole: Getting started with the DITA Open Toolkit if you plan to take this workshop.]

Leigh White

Leigh White is a technical communicator with almost 20 years of experience as a content creator, content manager, and production coordinator. One of her primary interests is exploring ways that small technical publication groups can leverage existing tools and improve processes to maximize the reuse of their content, improve their efficiency, increase their offerings, and save their sanity. To accomplish these goals, Leigh advocates that effective technical communicators need to be more than writers; they need to be part programmer, part designer, and part project manager. She is also a devotée of XML and structured documentation and she believes that DITA might just save the world. Her other professional interests include DTD and XSLT design, FrameMaker structured template and EDD design, and relational database design. When she is not parked in front of a computer, Leigh enjoys reading, running, hiking, photography, motorcycles, and a variety of other rather dangerous activities.