Globalization support offered by the DITA-OT

The DITA Open Toolkit offers globalization support in the following areas: Generated text, index sorting, and bi-directional text.

Generated text : Generated text is text that is rendered automatically in the output that is generated by the DITA-OT; this text is not located in the DITA source files. The following are examples of generated text:

-   The word "Chapter" in a PDF file.
-   The phrases "Related concepts," "Related tasks," and "Related reference" in HTML output.

Index sorting : The DITA-OT can use only a single language to sort indexes.

Bi-directional text : The DITA-OT contains style sheets (CSS files) that support both left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) languages.

When the DITA-OT generates output, it takes the first value for the @xml:lang attribute that it encounters, and then it uses that value to create generated text, perform index sorting, and determine which default CSS file is used. If no value for the @xml:lang attribute is found, the toolkit defaults to US English.