Publishing for DITA

This workshop title is currently offered online.

In-person workshops for your team can be either 3 or 4 days. The 3-day version will cover only PDF or HTML output. The 4-day version will cover both PDF and HTML5. 

Description

The Publishing for DITA workshop provides attendees with a hands-on walk-through of the essential DITA fundamentals, programming skills, and DITA Open Toolkit configurations required to style and publish DITA XML source.

After a brief overview of the DITA framework, course lectures and exercises focus on the key pieces of a DITA publishing architecture, how to set it up, and how to optimize its publishing capabilities using customizations and plug-ins. Attendees learn to set up a publishing architecture using the pipeline provided by the DITA-OT and how to configure and debug the DITA-OT.

With the publishing architecture set up and configured, participants are then introduced to the programming skills required to customize and optimize the publishing architecture. Practical exercises encompass all of the programming and markup languages needed to transform and format DITA XML. Languages include XSLT, XPath, XSL-FO, HTML5, and CSS.

After mastering the basics of the critical languages required to modify a plug-in, participants learn to implement the most common customizations organizations must make to transform the out-of-the-box DITA-OT output formats into styles that conform to their corporate look and feel. The course focuses on HTML and PDF outputs and covers how to make changes to the following areas:

• Typeface
• Page and screen layout
• Body elements
• Navigation
• Front and back matter

Note: Although the course content can be applied to any DITA tool, participants will be asked to download the oXygen editor for use within the course.

You will learn to

• Modify build files in the DITA-OT
• Create custom plugins for the DITA-OT
• Use XPath, XSLT, CSS, and XSL-FO to modify and enhance stylesheets
• Debug DITA-OT issues using messages and log files
• Customize HTML-based transformations
• Customize PDF transformations
• Publish in multiple languages
• Prepare for new trends in publishing

Prerequisites

Attendees must already be proficient in basic DITA, comfortable using authoring tools, but also unafraid of viewing and writing raw code as they learn the intricate details of a DITA-OT transformation. Instructors cannot take time from the class to tutor participants on standard DITA elements and attributes.