Using Open Source Plugins to Enhance DITA Publishing

The DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine has support for plugins which can be installed to customize or enhance the publishing process.

In time SyncroSoft (the company which produces Oxygen XML Editor) has developed and made open source lots of small plugins which can be installed in the publishing engine in order to:

  • Produce a single merged DITA document which can be used for quality checks.
  • Pack a zip file with all the DITA content in the project in order to share it with others.
  • Convert dynamically Excel tables to DITA tables.
  • Embed animated SVG and MathML equations in the HTML output.
  • Float images to surround them with the paragraph text in the HTML and PDF outputs.
  • Create PDF by styling the DITA content using CSS.
  • Present change tracking and comments in the PDF output.
  • Embed videos and iframes in the published HTML output.
  • Embed HTML content directly in DITA content.
  • Add links to online editing tools in the published HTML-based and PDF outputs.

I will be presenting small examples in order to show case what each plugin uploaded to the Oxygen XML GitHub organization does and maybe give you ideas about how you could use these open source plugins on your side.

Meet the Presenter

Radu Coravu started working more than 10 years ago as a software developer for Syncro Soft Ltd., the manufacturer of the popular Oxygen XML Editor. During the last years, his main focus has been in the development of the visual XML Author editing environment and the specific-DITA support provided by Oxygen. He provides support for complex integrations and helps steer the product in the right direction, all this with some development on the side.

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