Installing DITA OT 1.2beta onDebian Linux
I'm just setting up the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) on my Debian box, and I thought I'd take notes. This isn't really a how-to, but maybe it will help someone.
- Go to the DITA Open Toolkit webpage.
- In the left pane, click on Download
- Two choices - dita-ot releases under the CPL or the dita-ot released under the Apache ASL . Use whichever you prefer, the content of both packages is the same. I chose the Apache license.
- Look at the Linux Install Guide
- Extract the archive somewhere. In its current incarnation DITA is hard to share, so take that into account.
- Debian and Java have challenges. Make sure you install Java, at least 1.4 (there have been some problems with JDK 1.5, more on that later)
- Install (using apt) ant, ant-doc, and ant-optional.
- Install xalan, libxalan2-java and libxalan2-java-doc
- If you want to make PDFs, install fop.
- Go into the DITA directory and type "ant all" and you should be set to go.
Optional things:
If you are doing this for personal use, get RenderX's xep instead of fop. You can't really compare the two - xep is the better solution. Their free edition includes a little footer telling everyone about xep, but that's okay by me. They are giving me something free. I don't mind giving them some advertising for it. People pay $50 for a $5 t-shirt advertising Tommy or DKNY and they feel like they got a good deal.
Install eclipse. Managing ant projects can be a real pain. Take advantage of eclipse for doing that.
If you can afford it, buy oXygen. It's worth the $50 they charge, and their license is really good. Things may have changed, but the last time I tried the free XML editors on Linux, they left a lot to be desired, especially debugging support for XSL transformations. Really, I wanted to use emacs. I've used emacs for years, but I was wasting a lot of time and switched back to oXygen.
Use source control. Install CVS or something similar. It's too hard to manage XML projects without source control.