22 Jun 08 DITA-OP 1.0.0 M1 Announcement
I am pleased to announce the first milestone of the DITA Open Platform version 1.0.0
This milestone is a test release in order to see if there is interest in the DITA community for what the DITA Open Platform project plans to offer. It is also a mean to collect suggestions and ideas from the community.
The goal of this project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or teams that do not need a complete CMS solution.
The key deliverable of this milestone is the DITA-OP Editor, an Eclipse-based set of plugins featuring:
- The complete DITA architecture and language specification available through the Eclipse help system
- A DITA project nature which enables DITA files validation (pure XML validation and hyperlink references validation) and problem markers
- Wizards and templates to create new DITA files (topics, concepts, references, tasks, maps, bookmaps and processing profiles)
- A processing profile (ditaval) form editor
- A topic editor which leverages the power of the Eclipse XML editor (content assist, templates, as you type validation, formatting) with a dedicated preview page
- A launch configuration dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit which enables setting up the toolkit scripts, saving your configuration for later reuse or sharing and even adding automatic build to your DITA project.
Next step will be to provide a server packaging enabling:
- Configuration management of the DITA files
- Management of the authoring process
- Management of the publication process
For downloading please refer to the download page on this site.
Complete documentation has yet to come but the documentation page should give you an overview of what is already possible.
I will answer questions and support requests on the Yahoo! dita-users group.
Claude
Reader's Comments
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Wow. Downloading now. Thank you so much for undertaking this project! I look forward to trying it out.
Hi,
Its a great work you have done. I am a technical writer.
I had been looking for such solution. In fact i had been trying to create DITA project in Eclipse itself, but could not, as i am not that techie.
Your solution, till now, is working fine. I would like to understand how it works.
I would even like to create documentation for the installation and how to use it.
Please reply to my Email Id.
Hi,
Do you have any plans to support Eclipse Galileo?
Cheers,
Igor
Hi Igor,
I did not have time yet to try it, but if you do and find bugs do not hesitate to report them, I will do my best to correct them :)
Regards,
Claude
Hi Claude,
Congrats!
I have tried the latest DITA OP from the trunk using the Eclipse 3.5 SR1 and it seems to work great even using the latest DITA OT 1.5 M21 (There was bug I was having using the DITA 1.5 when they upgraded to a new XML parser and now the bug is gone, launchers were unusable, had to use command line).
Another think that was quite a surprise is the DITA MAP editor, looks quite good. Those eclipse forms come in handy quite well. The saving was a bit tricky though, there is bug (modifying the description of a ditamap, does not get the dirty asterisk that allows you to save unless you click in another part of the form [i.e. like the tree structure]).
I had the chance as well to see that the preview is working quite well with PNG files. All the documents with the PNGs look quite good.
I made a test if SVG would be working but did not work, it showed a missing red square.
Also the ‘Note’ element does not show a hand.
I basically work quite a lot with Eclipse plugins as a developer and user. I have seen that JBoss Tools XHTML has some kind of pseudo WYSIWYG. I was thinking maybe there is way to adapt a bit of it, and reuse an Eclipse form, with the tree structure of the topic to the left and the editor to the right.
If there is a way how to help please tell me.
Anyway, very good work and nice improvements so far.
Cheers,
Igor