The primary purpose of the DITA Open Toolkit is to transform
DITA maps and topics into other formats. The toolkit ships with several
native transforms, and can be extended to support any other output
format with by adding a new plug-in.
DITA to XHTML
The XHTML transform was the first transform created for the DITA Open Toolkit; it converts DITA topics into XHTML documents. In addition to the XHTML output, this transform also returns a simple table of contents file named index.html, which is based on the structure of the input map file.
DITA to Eclipse help
Eclipse output is an XHTML based output format used by the Eclipse Help system.
DITA to TocJS
The "tocjs" transform type is an XHTML based output type that also generates a frameset and a JavaScript based table of contents with expandable and collapsible entries. The tocjs transform type was originally created by Shawn McKenzie as a plug-in to the toolkit, and later bundled with the default distribution.
DITA to PDF (PDF2)
The DITA-OT transform to PDF was originally created as a plug-in and maintained outside of the main toolkit code. It was created as a more robust alternative to the demo PDF transform in the original toolkit, and thus was known as PDF2. The plug-in was bundled into the default toolkit distribution with release 1.4.3, and is run when setting the transform type to "pdf" or "pfd2".
DITA to HTML Help (CHM)
The "htmlhelp" transform type will generate HTML output, along with the control files needed to produce a Microsoft® HTML Help file.
DITA to ODT (Open Document Type)
The "odt" transform type produces output files that use the Open Document format, which is used by tools such as Open Office.
DITA to Docbook
The Docbook output routine (transform type "docbook) was converts DITA maps and topics into a Docbook output file. Complex DITA markup may not be supported by this process, but the transform does support most common DITA structures.
DITA to Troff
The "troff" transform produces output files for use with the Troff viewer on many Unix-style platforms, particularly for programs such as the Man page viewer. Each DITA topic document generally corresponds to one troff output file.
DITA to Eclipse Content
The "eclipsecontent" transform type was originally designed to work with an Eclipse plug-in for dynamically rendering DITA content. It returns Eclipse control files along with normalized DITA files (with preprocessing complete and default attributes included).
DITA to legacypdf (Deprecated)
The first few versions of the toolkit came with a demo PDF build, which was eventually replaced by the much more robust PDF Plug-in (also known as PDF2). This code is no longer maintained by the DITA-OT developers.
Migrating HTML to DITA
The HTML to DITA migration tool ships in the demo/ directory of the toolkit, and does not make use of the common toolkit processing for DITA content.