Building DITA output with Ant

Ant is an open tool that uses the DITA processes to make producing DITA output easier.

Introduction of Ant

DITA provides a set of XSLT scripts for producing different types of documentations such as: help output in Eclipse, Java Help and HTML Help, web HTML pages and PDF file.

To make it easier to call these scripts, the DITA distribution now provides an experimental Ant tool to automatically build the DITA documentations, demos, and samples.

Ant is a Java-based, open source tool provided by the Apache Foundation to declare a sequence of build actions. Meanwhile, Ant is well suited for development builds as well as document builds.

It is unnecessary for Ant to set up a build environment to run the DITA XSLT scripts. To run the DITA scripts directly, see the DITA Readme document.

Note: The following instructions and the associated build.xml and ditatargets.xml files are for the Java 1.4.2, Ant 1.6.5, FOP 0.20.5, and Saxon 6.5.3 releases. These instructions are likely to need some adjustment for other versions of these components and for specific environments.
Related concepts
DITA futures
Building DITA output with Java command line
Migrating HTML to DITA
Related reference
DITA release notes
Problem determination and log analysis
Controls, parameters, tweaks, and gizmos for dita2htmlImpl.xsl
Known Limitations
Troubleshooting
Related information
DITA release history
Tested platforms and tools
Using DITA transforms
Transfomring DITA to Word RTF