Events • DITA-OT Day - Rotterdam 2022

November 13, 2022

Welcome to the DITA-OT Day 2022!

We are happy to host the DITA-OT Day conference once again, the full day conference dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit project, which is the reference DITA implementation and the core of almost all DITA-based publishing solutions!

After the success of its previous editions, this event is returning for its 7th iteration, taking place this time in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on November 13, 2022. It's important to note that DITA-OT Day is an on-site event and coincides with ConVEx Europe's (formerly known as DITA Europe) pre-conference day, making it simple for those who want to attend both conferences back-to-back as both events are held at the nhow Rotterdam Hotel.

This free event is brought to you by Oxygen XML Editor with the help of the following DITA-OT Day supporters:

Photo Gallery

Agenda

8:30 - 9:00		Registration and welcome coffee
9:00 - 9:15	Video	Welcome and sponsor presentation
9:15 - 9:30		News and announcements - DITA-OT Day team
9:30 - 10:00	Video	Making the migration leap: jumping across versions to the latest DITA-OT - Robert D. Anderson Robert D. Anderson Many DITA-OT implementations are unable or unwilling to move off of obsolete versions. Some shops continue to run version 1.8.5, released 8 years back (and 15 major versions behind the latest). Why is that the case? What is preventing teams from moving to a more recent, full featured, and supported release? In this session we will discuss what’s involved in moving off of older releases from 1.x, 2.x, and now early 3.x. Most importantly, is it worth it? What would you get from upgrading? When you decide to move, should you go one version at a time, or jump to the latest? Attendees who have gone through this migration in the last few years are encouraged to discuss their experience; attendees who are still running older releases are likewise encouraged to discuss their concerns or share any upgrade plans.
10:00 - 10:15	Video Slides	Technical values - Stefan Jung Stefan Jung This talk shows how to single-source technical values in a complex environment with a product information management system and how to convert it to various different formats on-the-fly.
10:15 - 10:30	Video Slides	Avoiding duplicate effort with post-preprocessing - Tim Grantham Tim Grantham If you have publishing requirements, such as custom styling or content restructuring, that applies to multiple outputs (such as PDF and HTML), use post-preprocessing to restructure content before it heads further down the pipeline.
10:30 - 11:00		Coffee break
11:00 - 11:40	Video Slides	DITA and Markdown and Docker, oh my… - John Kirkilis John Kirkilis Nokia’s Cloud and Network Services is one of three major business groups in Nokia, all of which use DITA and DITA-OT for the great majority of customer-facing documentation. Unlike Nokia’s Mobile Networks or Network Infrastructure groups, CNS focuses entirely on software for both cloud and core network solutions and services. With the advent of co-authoring between DITA content from Technical Writers and Markdown content from R&D developers, Lw-DITA and the Lw-DITA OT-plugin have now become key aspects of our documentation ecosystem. The CNS User Assistance Tools team has implemented a dozen OT Plugins, and leverages Ant, Maven, Git, and Jenkins plugins to support both local documentation builds on writers’ workstations as well as CI builds on a server farm orchestrated by Kubernetes. By packaging our Maven, Ant, and DITA-OT customizations into separate Docker layers, we're able to allow R&D pipelines to build the corresponding documentation during a software build to support rapid CI/CD deployments going forward. With the generation of OT Project files by our pipeline, we were able to further eliminate the need for some of our previous scaffolding. Local workstation builds are facilitated by OxygenXML SDK plugins to marshal writer configuration info to OT. Unit testing of our OT customizations is accomplished using a combination of XSpec, AntUnit and Jenkins. The next wave of OT plugins will support OpenAPI3 conversion to DITA in a pre-process plugin and to Markdown. We will also be enriching our content to better support modern presentation solutions, including the application of machine learning and AI-assisted solutions.
11:40 - 12:10	Video	Scaling the DITA Open Toolkit for Enterprise Use - Robert Anderson Robert Anderson Moderated discussion about scaling the DITA Open Toolkit for use in big companies.
12:10 - 12:25	Video Slides	Simpler custom PDFs - The user perspective - Roger Sheen Roger Sheen Many tech writers find it hard to customize the DITA Open Toolkit’s default PDF output. Even relatively minor adjustments require knowledge of XSLT, attribute sets, DITA-OT plug-ins, and a bit of research to figure out what you need to change. What if there were an easier way? The DITA-OT project team has been working on an alternative mechanism that can be used to configure basic formatting in a simple plain-text theme file. This approach makes it easier to adjust page sizes, headers and footers, and various attributes for common elements. While complex customizations would still require a custom plug-in, if you just need to tweak a few font families and colors to approximate your company branding, this new alternative might be all you need.
12:25 - 12:40	Video Slides	Simpler custom PDFs - The technical details - Jarno Elovirta Jarno Elovirta Technical description of how the new theme plug-in processes theme files to produce PDF output. We go through how code generation is used to produce XSLT templates that build on PDF2 processing and how that allows us to produce PDFs without coding XSLT. No prior experience with PDF2 customization is required.
13:00 - 14:00		Lunch
14:00 - 14:40	Video	Various DITA publishing ideas experimented on the Oxygen XML Blog - Radu Coravu Radu Coravu I will discuss about various articles we wrote on the Oxygen XML Blog in the last years about various ways to enhance DITA publishing: Generating Google Structured Data Generating content for the Google Chatbot Converting OpenAPI to DITA content Showing consecutive codeblocks in separate tabs Generating an RSS feed Tagging certain articles with labels Embedding diagrams in DITA content Creating Link Graphs From DITA Maps Publishing DITA Content Using the MKDocs Web Site Generator and others.
14:40 - 15:00	Video Slides	Pushing square pegs into round holes - Jarno Elovirta Jarno Elovirta Topic based structured writing doesn’t require DITA or XML. It can be done with a pen and paper. What is required, however, is a lot of discipline. What happens when people are sold an authoring format that allows you to write DITA and that technology will not hold your hand and help you to stick to the rules and guidelines? A description of what happens in one DITA processor when it’s given something that is not DITA but the user really, really wants it to work.
15:00 - 15:15	Video	Extending Doctales `reveal.js` with CSS Grid - Lief Erickson Lief Erickson The Doctales plugin creates web presentations using the `reveal.js` framework. By default the reveal framework does not support CSS Grid or viewport overflow. I'll cover how I extended the XSLT in a new plugin and added a new theme with CSS grid and other features using SCSS.
15:15 - 15:30	Video Slides	Supercharging DITA-OT Webhelp creation - Jang Graat Jang Graat DITA is all about reuse, but when it comes to publishing, none of the existing output makes it into the new publication. In this lightning talk, I will demonstrate how Webhelp (or any HTML-based) output creation can be made 1000 times faster by only recompiling the DITA files that have changed. Using technology that existed even before the birth of XML in a way that nobody has tried before. Conceptual talk, but including proof of concept with fully working demo. Fasten your seatbelts before takeoff.
15:30 - 16:00		Coffee break
16:00 - 16:20	Video	Our experience helping the DITA-OT project as a commercial company - Radu Coravu Radu Coravu I will cover the various ways in which Oxygen XML Editor tries to help the DITA Open Toolkit project (by adding issues, opening pull requests, adding documentation issues, helping people with DITA OT related questions on various channels, attending in the DITA OT meetings and sponsoring the DITA OT Day events).
16:20 - 17:00	Video Slides	DITA HTML Styling via Bootstrap 5 - Jason Fox Jason Fox A code walkthrough of the updated html-bootstrap plugin demonstrating newly supported supported components and accessibility options, and discussing the challenges of mapping DITA to structured HTML using XSL transforms.
17:00 - 18:00	Video	Shop talk - DITA-OT team at DITA-OT Day 2022