DITA OT release 1.4

The DITA-OT Release 1.4 contains full support for the OASIS DITA 1.1 standard. This completes the preliminary support added in the 1.3 and 1.3.1 versions of the toolkit. New and improved items for 1.1 are listed under [Improvements] below. Support for the new bookmap standard is available in the latest version of the FO plug-in, which uses the "pdf2" transform type; it will be released together with or soon after the release of DITA-OT 1.4. The deprecated "pdf" transform type has not been updated for the new bookmap. Together with DITA 1.1 support, the toolkit development team has improved error reporting so that build failures are more accurately reported at the end of the build. Error handling will continue to improve in future releases. Release 1.4 comes in two versions. The full version contains several external packages that are useful or critical to running the toolkit, such as Xalan and the XML Catalog resolver. The smaller package contains only core toolkit code. NOTE ABOUT DEPRECATED CODE: changes for the new DITAVAL standard required a change to code in dita2htmlImpl.xsl. The "flagit" named template is deprecated and will not work with the new ditaval format. Overrides to this step should be updated to use "start-flagit" and "end-flagit". The flagit template will continue to work with the old ditaval but will generate a warning for each call.

Changes

1. Release 1.4 improves the processing of DITA documents using XML Schemas. One was able to process these type of documents in Release 1.3.1 but it meant that the schema location had to have the ablsolute location of the schema in order for the Toolkit properly.

   DITA 1.1 introduces the use of URNs to normatively identify the schemas used for validation. The URNs have the following desing pattern "urn:oasis:names:tc:dita:xsd:<schemaDocument>:1.1". You should use these in as the value for the attribute xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation.

13 Improvements

1. Support <title> in map
2. Ignore Index-base in default processing
3. Retrieve the link text from abstract element.
4. Format shortdesc in abstract appropriately
5. Add standard code to allow overrides to easily process generalized version of unknown and foreign element
6. Support @dir on every element
7. Refactor mapref resolution
8. Support generalization and re-specialization of unknown/foreign elements
9. Replace Move Index module with new Move Metadata module
10. New DITAVAL standard support
11. New chunk attribute support
12. Support XML Schema validated instance document processing using XML Catalogs

17 SF Bugs Fixed

1. 1700561 Null Pointer Exception on Missing domain= Attribute
2. 1733264 pretty.xsl is broken
3. 1619074 table in step screws up following steps for HTML generation
4. 1728700 GenMapAndTopicList keeps filtering when called a second time
5. 1732562 DitaWriter.java can duplicate @xtrf and @xtrc
6. 1733108 Update Bookmap sample files to DITA 1.1
7. 1706263 Conrefing from a map to topic is not working properly
8. 1677620 Non-DITA file is treated as DITA in pre-process
9. 1717471 Links show up more than once
10. 1712543 gen-list-without-flagging : NullPointerException
11. 1652892 Invalid hdr/ftr arg value causes build failure
12. 1647950 PIs in DITA source are dropped in the processing pipeline
13. 1644559 Force Toolkit to use private catalog to allow schemas to work properly
14. 1642138 Move javamerge target out of build_template.xml
15. 1643155 Map TOC is HTML even for transtype="xhtml"
16. 1637564 topicpull breaks specializations of xref
17. 1676968 Plugins adding to classpath break when basedir != dita.dir