Events • DITA-OT Day - Helsinki 2024

February 11, 2024

Welcome to the DITA-OT Day 2024!

Oxygen XML Editor hosted the DITA-OT Day conference once again, the full-day event 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 the previous editions, this event returned for its 8th iteration, taking place this time in Helsinki, Finland, on February 11, 2024. DITA-OT Day was an on-site event organized as the DITA Europe's pre-conference day, making it simple for those who wanted to attend both conferences back-to-back as both events were held at the Scandic Park Helsinki hotel.

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

Agenda

8:00 - 8:30		Registration and welcome coffee
8:30 - 8:45	Video	Welcome and sponsor presentation	DITA-OT Day Sponsors
8:45 - 9:00	Video	News and announcements	DITA-OT Day Team
9:00 - 9:15	Video	Retrospective - DITA-OT improvements between 3.7 and 4.1 Taking a look at what features, improvements and bug fixes were added between DITA OT 3.7 and 4.1.	Jarno Elovirta - DITA-OT Main Developer
9:15 - 9:30	Video Slides	Moving an HTML plugin to preprocess2: how scared should you be? Our custom HTML plugin includes several extension points that hook into the old "preprocess" steps -- meaning that when the base code moves to "preprocess2", those extensions are lost. In this session, I will talk about what was required to adopt the updated model, what worked and didn't, how we re-integrated the old extensions, and how we went about testing the changes.	Robert D. Anderson - DITA-OT Project Lead
9:30 - 9:50	Video	Documentation Developments This talk provides an overview of recent changes to the DITA-OT documentation and project website, points out open issues, highlights ideas for future improvements, and closes with room for suggestions from the community and a call for contributions.	Roger Sheen - Documentation Lead
9:50 - 10:10	Video Slides	IBM Workflow Manager: an automated build environment In this presentation, I will talk about what IBM has been doing the last 5 years with DITA, and how we integrated the DITA-OT as the center piece of our automated build system for technical documentation, called IBM Workflow Manager (WFM). WFM is a cloud based solution meant to automatically build DITA files stored in GitHub (possibility from multiple repositories), test Accessibility, and publish the outputs to their final location (either IBM Documentation website at ibm.com/docs or other channel like Box or sFTP servers). It also connects to communication channels like Slack to give real-time feedback on any failure that might happen. Along with edit links based on Oxygen Web Author, it creates a 0 click user experience where users can edit their documentation from their browser, and see the output live a few minutes later.	Guillaume Delory
10:10 - 10:30	Video Slides	From zero to DITA-OT hero – a story of a DITA-OT implementation in a small documentation team So you just got a new job as a technical writer in a modern, high-tech company. They want to move away from MS Word documentation to a structured documentation but have no idea how to do it and guess what – you are the person who will do it from beginning to the end! The problem is you don’t even know how to start... You have been doing documentation in Adobe InDesign and MS Word so far. You only heard about this DITA thing and heard it’s quite cool but haven’t done any work with it. In addition, your teammate is about to retire and you are soon to learn that the Internet is NOT full of easy-access information about DITA-OT. Embark with me on this exciting journey of big successes and many challenges in setting up a working environment to write and publish user documentation with DITA and DITA-OT. A light-hearted view on learning DITA and DITA Open Toolkit from scratch while trying to prove to your new employer that yes, structured documentation is the best solution and it will bring cost savings.	Justyna Hietala
10:30 - 11:00		Coffee break
11:00 - 11:20	Video Slides	Cheap and Easy Cross-Deliverable Link Implementation ServiceNow uses cross-deliverable key references to author and publish links between publications, primarily published through Zoomin (https://docs.servicenow.com). We implemented this by generating "delivery keydef maps" from our root maps from the peer map references in each root map. We then use a simple OT extension and XSLT transform to swap the peer maprefs for references to the delivery keydef maps at build time. The delivery keydef maps are managed in a dedicated git repository.	Eliot Kimber
11:20 - 11:40	Video Slides	Deploying and Maintaining DITA OTs in an Enterprise environment For our clients, we support DITA OTs from 1.5.2 to 4.x. More advanced users can maintain and update their own OTs while others are maintained by Ixiasoft. We will discuss some of the challenges in in supporting DITA OTs in an enterprise environment.	Eric Sirois
11:40 - 12:10	Video Slides	DITA-OT plug-in for work instructions: Say goodbye to manual summaries and hello to accuracy and efficiency! We understand the importance of having a clear and concise summary at the beginning of each work instruction. That's why we've developed a plug-in that automates the creation of these summaries based on the information in the individual steps of the work instruction. With our DITA-OT plug-in, content creators can now easily add the tools, supplies, and spare parts in the individual steps of the work instruction, knowing that the summary will always reflect the most up-to-date information. No more worrying about inconsistencies or discrepancies between the summary and the steps! This plug-in not only saves time for the writer but also ensures that mechanics in the workshops have access to accurate and reliable information.	Pieterjan Vandenweghe
12:10 - 12:30	Video Slides	Publishing with iiRDS from DITA iiRDS, the tekom standard for the standardized exchange and delivery of technical documentation, has been on the market for a few years. We have demonstrated in the past why an XML standard like DITA is a good fit. Coming in 2024, tekom is publising an OT plugin that allows to generate iiRDS packages from standard DITA, based on the metadata that you already have. After a brief introduction to iiRDS, you will learn how you can make use of the plugin in your DITA environment.	Marion Knebel
12:30 - 14:00		Lunch
14:00 - 14:30	Video	DITA and Markdown Interoperability using new schema-provider extension mechanism In order to support a new DITA <topicmeta> specialization, we added support for it in Markdown content by leveraging the new schema-provider mechanism to customize Markdown parsing and transparent DITA conversion.	John Kirkilis
14:30 - 14:40	Video	DITA-OT and ensuring DITA Map conversion DeltaXML software were until now focused on comparing two XML documents of same structure and similar data to identify the changes between them by considering the structure. However, we recently started to look at the use case where there is a need to compare XML documents with different structure but similar data. We came across some of partners and customers who convert their documents from one form of XML to another which needs a manual process to check if there were any errors or inconsistencies during the document conversion. DeltaXML's new product, ConversionQA, understands different document formats such DITA, Microsoft Word, etc and performs a comparison between original and converted document provide a quality assurance report. ConversionQA makes use of the DITA-OT transformation to process DITA Maps into a single DITA file for conversion checking process with another single file format. We have used DITA-OT Java Application Programming Interface in product to process DITA Maps as a part of overall workflow. The lightning the talk will focus on how we have integrated DITA-OT in conversion. We will also discuss the issues we faced during DITA OT integration and how they were resolved.	Tejas Pradip Barhate
14:40 - 14:50	Video	PDF5-ML Plugin Update An update on the features of the PDF5-ML Plugin, including details of the new automated ability to show Oxygen change tracking and comments in PDF output.	Tony Graham
14:50 - 15:00	Video Slides	DITA-OT "How far can you go" "I will demonstrate a plugin, which adds functions to the DITA-OT that are very useful in particular for industry and reseach. Out of many helpful extensions there are mechanisms like ""Auto-Bibliography Generation"", ""Auto-Image Sizing"", Page Control (e.g. ""Landscape page in a flow of upright pages"") and many more. All extensions are convertible into DOCX, HTML and CHM. A full documentation is available for all implemented extensions."	Helmut Scherzer
15:00 - 15:15		Extended PDF Output - The ezRead Plugin Announcing a freely available software which allows highly efficient cross referencing in PDF output generated by the DITA-OT. Together with the DITA-OT the presented (small) software package explores a new dimension for the readability of PDF documentation.	Helmut Scherzer
15:15 - 15:30	Video Slides	Using DITA Open Toolkit Project to Implement a Publishing Service in a Commercial Application Oxygen Content Fusion version 6 started using DITA Open Toolkit project files to define publications and deliverables and then to publish based on the defined deliverables using a publishing service. In this small talk I will present the usefulness of the DITA OT project file when it comes to defining deliverables, publication parameters and publishing in the Oxygen Content Fusion commercial application.	Radu Coravu
15:30 - 16:00		Coffee break
16:00 - 16:20	Video Slides	Syntax Diagrams: If you can't avoid them... Syntax diagrams belong to the kind of special-purpose documentation that nobody really wants to deal with, the presenter included. This is a brief overview of real-world challenges in general and how to represent syntax diagrams in DITA in particular.	Frank Wegmann
16:20 - 16:40	Video Slides	Lessons Learned: Migrating DITA-OT For an IT Hardware Product Documentation The migration of DITA-OT poses unique challenges, particularly when applied to the context of IT hardware product documentation. The narrative explains the crucial decision-making processes, including the initial assessment of legacy documentation systems, the formulation of migration strategies, and the execution of the migration plan. Key focus areas include content reusability, metadata structuring, and adaptation of DITA-OT functionalities to cater specifically to the nuances of IT hardware documentation. Drawing from first-hand experiences, I will outline the technical challenges encountered during the migration process and innovative solutions and best practices adopted to overcome them. It addresses issues such as maintaining document integrity, preserving hyperlink structures, and ensuring seamless integration with existing IT infrastructure.	Amit Siddhartha
16:40 - 17:00	Video Slides	Search, Style and More - Extending DITA Bootstrap The basic Bootstrap HTML provides a professional looking framework for DITA documents, however with a single extension point you can do so much more. A short presentation on adding Lunr Search, extending and customising the Bootstrap CSS and making additional modifications to the Bootstrap look-and-feel.	Jason Fox
17:00 - 17:30	Video	Future Plans	DITA-OT Day Team

Video Presentations