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.