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.