Glossary

Certain terms have particular meaning in the context of the DITA Open Toolkit project.

argument

Required parameter passed to the Ant process or dita command.

DITA Open Toolkit

The open-source publishing engine for content authored in the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

DITA-OT

Note: Treat as a proper noun; do not precede with the definite article.

DOST

Note: Deprecated acronym for “DITA Open __S__ource Toolkit”. Use DITA-OT instead.

extension point

Pre-defined interface that can be added to a plug-in to allow other plug-ins to extend or customize portions of its functionality. An extendable feature is defined by declaring an extension-point element in the plugin.xml file. Other plug-ins can then override the default behavior by defining custom code that runs when this extension point is called.

option

Discretionary parameter passed to the Ant process or dita command.

output format

Deliverable file or set of files containing all of the transformed content.

parameter

Command-line argument or option passed to the Ant process or dita command.

plug-in

Group of related files that change the default behavior of DITA-OT in some way.

processor

Software that performs a series of operations to transform DITA content from one format to another.

property

Ant-specific argument or option.

template

Optional template elements can be added to plugin.xml files to define XML or XSL files that integrate DITA-OT extensions. Template files are often named with a _template suffix, and may be used to create custom extensions, group targets, and more. Anything contained in the plug-in’s template files is integrated when the plug-in is installed.

transformation type

Component of a plug-in that defines an output format.

transtype

Note: Abbreviated form of transformation type. Use only to refer to the transtype parameter of the dita command, or to the transtype element in a plugin.xml file that defines the output format.

variable

Language-specific piece of generated text, most often defined in the files in org.dita.base\xsl\common.

XSL template

Set of rules in an XSL stylesheet that are applied to nodes that match specific XML structures.