DITA Open Toolkit

DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) is an open-source publishing engine for content authored in the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).^[1]

DITA Open Toolkit

Initial release	3 March 2005; 20 years ago (2005-03-03)
Stable release	4.3.1 / 23 March 2025 (2025-03-23)
Repository	github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/
Written in	Java, XSLT, Ant
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	www.dita-ot.org

The toolkit's extensible plug-in mechanism allows users to add their own transformations and customize the default output, which includes:^[2]

• Eclipse Help
• HTML5
• Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
• Markdown
• PDF, through XSL-FO
• troff
• XHTML and XHTML with a JavaScript frameset

Originally developed by IBM and released to open source in 2005,^[3] the distribution packages contain Ant, Apache FOP, Java, Saxon, and Xerces.

Many DITA authoring tools and DITA CMSs integrate the DITA-OT, or parts of it, into their publishing workflows.^[4]

Standalone tools have also been developed to run the DITA-OT via a graphical user interface instead of the command line.