dita2go.com

DITA is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an OASIS Standard. It is an XML architecture designed for publications and used by increasing numbers of technical authors throughout the world. It provides a presentation-neutral, portable way of creating and organizing document content.

Since DITA deliberately excludes presentational information, DITA authors use various tools for creating deliverable documents from their DITA content. The primary tool since DITA's inception has been the DITA Open Toolkit, the DITA-OT, which is free Open Source software contributed and largely maintained by IBM engineers. The DITA-OT is the "reference implementation" of tools for DITA presentation. It is written in XSLT and Java, and is available from SourceForge.

While the DITA-OT is very good for showing what is possible as a "proof of concept" for DITA use, it has some significant drawbacks for commercial use. It can be challenging to configure, even to create a custom cover page with a company logo on it. Most changes require writing and editing XSLT, and often Java too, a task that many technical writers are ill equipped for and find daunting. It is also rather slow; a large project can take an hour to complete on a fast machine. So a few other development groups have taken on the challenge of creating a tool that writers can use more easily, and that can deliver results many times faster. DITA2Go is such a tool.

DITA2Go converts DITA content to a dozen output formats. Those include HTML, XHTML, many on-line Help formats, Word RTF, generic XML, DocBook, and DITA itself. For on-line Help, it produces Microsoft HTML Help, Eclipse Help, Sun's Java Help, Oracle Help for Java, WinHelp 4, and Open Source cross-platform cross-browser OmniHelp, which is also hosted on SourceForge. Although DITA2Go itself is not free Open Source, it is quite affordable at $US295 per seat, and is provided free for many people, including the unemployed, underemployed consultants, academics (faculty, staff, and students), most nonprofits, all developers of Free Open Source Software, and all members of the DITA Technical Committee at OASIS.

While DITA2Go is a recent addition to the DITA output world, with its Beta program beginning on November 11, 2009, and initial release on March 8, 2010, it is largely based on mature, well-tested code from Omni Systems' other main product, the FrameMaker plugin Mif2Go. It generates all output formats supported by Mif2Go, using DITA as its single source rather than FrameMaker. Its DITA import module builds upon Mif2Go's experience with DITA output, and fully supports the current DITA spec, 1.1, plus most of the unreleased 1.2 features, including keyref and conkeyref. And it is very fast; it converts many projects in under a minute, processing DITA code at over 2MB per minute (roughly 250 printed output pages per minute). It also includes a simple GUI, for those who prefer that to command-line operation, and easily integrates with XML editors like oXygenXML.

Complete DITA2Go documentation, produced from a DITA bookmap by DITA2Go itself, is publically available at the Download link to the left.

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