DITA OT Developer / DITA Content Strategist Location Ireland
Hybrid work
Employment type Full time.
Salary Open
Job Description Job Summary The DITA OT Developer is responsible for developing and maintaining DITA Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and DITA Open Toolkit-based output plugins using XSLT and Java.
This includes XSL-FO-based PDF deliverables, online HTML deliverables, product-integrated WebHelp, and XML conversion utilities.
This role's core focus designs and develops DITA-OT solutions for integration into authoring and additional rendition environments.
As a member of a cross-functional development team, DITA-OT Developers collaborate with business operations groups, IT groups, and structured authoring teams.
Years of experience needed 5+ Years of experience Technical Skills: Core DITA & XML Skills DITA authoring concepts: topics, maps, specialization, constraints, reuse strategies.
XML fundamentals: schemas (DTD, XSD), namespaces, validation.
XSLT & XPath: customizing and writing transformations for DITA-OT outputs.
DITA-OT plugins: creating and maintaining custom plugins for specialized publishing needs.
DITA specialization: extending or restricting base DITA for domain-specific needs.
Programming & Markup Java & Ant: understanding DITA-OT's build framework, writing extensions.
HTML5 & CSS3: styling web outputs.
Regular expressions: text manipulation and validation tasks.
Publishing & Output Customization PDF publishing: PDF2 plugin, XSL-FO, or alternative PDF processors (Antenna House, RenderX, FOP).
HTML publishing: customizing HTML5, CHM, WebHelp, or site outputs.
Multi-channel publishing: knowledge of EPUB, Eclipse Help, Markdown, or custom outputs.
Tools & Environment DITA authoring tools: Oxygen XML Author/Editor, FrameMaker, Arbortext.
DITA-OT build management: command line, Ant scripts, Gradle tasks.
Source control: Git, SVN, or similar for managing content and customizations.
Continuous Integration (CI/CD): integrating DITA-OT builds with Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, etc.
Quality & Testing DITA content validation: ensuring content adheres to DITA rules and constraints.
Unit testing for transformations: validating XSLT and plugin changes.
Performance optimization: tuning builds for large document sets.
Soft Skills Analytical thinking: diagnosing publishing issues in transformations.
Collaboration: working with writers, architects, and tool teams.
Documentation: writing clear technical notes on customization and plugins.
Problem-solving mindset: debugging complex build pipelines.