DITA on a Diet: Setting Up and Using Lightweight DITA (LwDITA)

Topic-based, structured authoring has well-known benefits, but traditionally require high-end XML-based publishing systems. The costs to acquire and support those systems place them out of reach for many documentation departments.

Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) is changing that. Write your topics in HTML5 or Markdown, and use the standard DITA Open Toolkit to publish. Markdown and HTML5 topics are co-equal with full-weight DITA topics, allowing SMEs to contribute content in familiar formats for departments with a DITA-based publishing system.

In this small 68-page (PDF) book, Larry Kollar shows you how to set up and deploy an LwDITA publishing system using open-source tools.

The PDF is available in the Release section, or download it directly.

Building the book

To build the book from source, you need:

• DITA Open Toolkit, v3.0 or newer. Install the latest version if possible.
• For PDF, use the com.ojemedia.pdf69 plugin. This is optional, but recommended. Copy the com.ojemedia.pdf69 directory into plugins in the DITA-OT directory, then use the command dita --install to integrate it.
• Edit the lwd.properties file in this directory, replacing the absolute path names with your own directory path.

Build a PDF

dita --input=lwdita.ditamap --propertyfile=lwd.properties --format=pdf69

If you are not using the pdf69 plugin, replace that with the proper format name for your PDF plugin.

Build a set of static HTML pages

dita --input=lwdita.ditamap --propertyfile=lwd.properties --format=html5 \
    --output=out/html

Open the HTML starting with intro.html.

Note: I ran into errors using DITA-OT 3.2.1. Versions 3.1 and 3.3.2 work, though.