Using DITA transforms

The core transforms of the DITA Toolkit represent the "Reference Implementation" for processing the standard DITA specification as maintained by OASIS Open.

Pre-process

A pre-process is done before the main transformation. The input of Pre-process is dita files and the output of Pre-process is also dita files. But the output is in temp directory. Pre-process is the basic for the main transformation, it handles several different processing before the main transformation. Without pre-process, dita topics and map can still be transformed into different outputs, but the features in pre-process such as resolving conref attribute are not available.

Available core transforms

A core DITA transform is the basic set of templates that support all the elements of a topic. This set is the basis for the following processing of any specialized element. Core transforms handle one topic instance, or nested set of topics, at a time. The DITA Toolkit provides these core transforms:
dita2xhtml.xsl
DITA topic to HTML page transform.
dita2fo-shell.xsl
DITA topic to XSL Formatting Object page transform.

Available special output formats

Additional map-driven tools support transforming sets of topics into special output formats, including:
Web page (map2htmtoc.xsl)
This transform generates a set of web pages with an index page that is ready to place on a Web site.
map2htmlhelp (map2hhc.xsl map2hhp.xsl)
This transform generates hhc and hhp file for the compilation of Html Help.
map2javahelp (map2JavaHelpToc.xsl map2JavaHelpMap.xsl)
This transform generates table of content and jhm file for Java Help.
map2eclipsehelp (map2elipse.xsl)
This transform generates table of content for help contents in Eclipse.
map2printout
Calls topicmerge to consolidate a set of topics into a single entity that is transformed into Formatting Objects (FO), which can be compiled into PDF.

Invoke the complete transformation

The complete transformation including pre-process can be excuted by the ant script. There are some examples of simple ant script in directory /ant. The ant target for the transformation which can be called is listed at Running Ant

Related concepts
DITA futures
Building DITA output with Ant
Building DITA output with Java command line
Migrating HTML to DITA
DITA to Word output transform
Related reference
DITA release notes
Problem determination and log analysis
Known Limitations
Troubleshooting
Related information
DITA release history
Tested platforms and tools