Migrating to release 1.5.4

DITA-OT 1.5.4 adds new extension points to configure behavior based on file extensions, declare print transformation types and add mappings to the PDF configuration catalog file. PDF output supports mirrored page layout and uses new font family definitions. Support for several new languages was added for PDF and XHTML output.

Configuration properties file changes

In previous versions, the lib/configuration.properties file was generated by the integration process. Integration has been changed to generate lib/org.dita.dost.platform/plugin.properties and the role of the old lib/configuration.properties has been changed to contain defaults and configuration options, such as default language.

The dita.plugin.org.dita.*.dir properties have been changed to point to the DITA-OT base directory.

To allow access to configuration files, the lib directory needs to be added to the Java classpath.

New plug-in extension points

New plug-in extension points have been added allow configuring DITA-OT behavior based on file extensions.

Extension point Description Default values
dita.topic.extension DITA topic .dita, .xml
dita.map.extensions DITA map .ditamap
dita.html.extensions HTML file .html, .htm
dita.resource.extensions Resource file .pdf, .swf

Both HTML and resource file extensions are used to determine if a file in source is copied to output.

A new plug-in extension point has been added to declare transformation types as print types.

Extension point Description
dita.transtype.print Declare transformation type as a print type.

The print_transtypes property in integrator.properties has been deprecated in favor of dita.transtype.print.

Plugin URI scheme

Support for the plugin URI scheme has been added to XSLT stylesheets. Plug-ins can refer to files in other plug-ins without hard-coding relative paths, for example: 

<xsl:import href="plugin:org.dita.pdf2:xsl/fo/topic2fo_1.0.xsl"/>

XHTML

Support for the following languages has been added:

  • Indonesian
  • Kazakh
  • Malay

PDF

Support for mirrored page layout was added. The default is the unmirrored layout. The following XSLT configuration variables have been deprecated:

  • page-margin-left
  • page-margin-right

The following variables should be used instead to control page margins:

  • page-margin-outside
  • page-margin-inside

The args.bookmap-order property has been added to control how front and back matter are processed in bookmaps. The default is to reorder the frontmatter content as in previous releases.

A new extension point has been added to add mappings to the PDF configuration catalog file.

Extension point Description
org.dita.pdf2.catalog.relative Configuration catalog includes.

Support for the following languages has been added:

  • Finnish
  • Hebrew
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Swedish

PDF processing no longer copies images or generates XSL FO to output directory. Instead, the temporary directory is used for all temporary files and source images are read directly from source directory. The legacy processing model can be enabled by setting org.dita.pdf2.use-out-temp to true in configuration properties; support for the legacy processing model may be removed in future releases.

Support for FrameMaker index syntax has been disabled by default. To enable FrameMaker index syntax, set org.dita.pdf2.index.frame-markup to true in configuration properties.

A configuration option has been added to disable internationalization (I18N) font processing and use stylesheet-defined fonts. To disable I18N font processing, set org.dita.pdf2.i18n.enabled to false in configuration properties.

The XSLT parameters customizationDir and fileProfilePrefix have been removed in favor of the customizationDir.url parameter.

A new shell stylesheet has been added for FOP and other shell stylesheets have also been revised. Plug-ins which have their own shell stylesheets for PDF processing should make sure all required stylesheets are imported.

Font family definitions in stylesheets have been changed from Sans, Serif, and Monospaced to sans-serif, serif, and monospace, respectively. The I18N font processing still uses the old logical names and aliases are used to map the new names to old ones.