The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. The two central units of authoring in DITA are the topic and the map. A topic is a single continuous narrative that should be written to be independently usable and understandable. A map combines multiple topics into a structure that is appropriate for a particular deliverable. A topic might be "Configuring the server." That topic might appear in an installation manual, a troubleshooting guide and a system maintenance handbook. Each book would typically be represented by a unique map (although maps can share structure). Maps are XML documents that consist primarily of links to topics and metadata. They do not have content themselves. Most often, they are hierarchical and define a Table of Contents for the deliverable.
The DITA Rendition Engine uses the DITA Open Toolkit to transform DITA content (topics and maps) into PDF. The DITA Open Tookit is an implementation of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee's specification for DITA DTDs and Schemas. IBM FileNet DITA Publishing supports the DITA Language Specification v1.1. The DITA Rendition Engine executes as a background process on the Content Engine server. Unlike the Rendition Engine, the DITA Rendition Engine does not require a separate server installation.
The DITA Open Toolkit takes a disk-based ditamap XML file and a set of topic XML files (which are stored in the Content Engine) and converts them into PDF or HTML. In the default implementation of DITA Open Toolkit, these files must be file system and folder based. The DITA Open Toolkit uses Apache Ant and eXtensible Style Language (XSL) and XSL Transforms (XSLT) to convert a Ditamap and group of topics into a final document format. The currently supported output is PDF.
FIleNet P8 is integrated with the DITA OT as follows:
The DITA Rendition Engine Connection configuration specifies:
Using the DITA Style Template, you can optionally specify a conditional processing profile, a ditaval file, to identify which values you want to conditionally process for a particular output, build, or other purpose.
Using the DITA parameters you provide, FileNet P8 uses the DITA Open Toolkit along with the JVM arguments and optional ditaval file to publish the DITA document. The document is stored in the working directory.