The DITA-OT LwDITA plug-in supersedes the previously released Markdown plug-in for DITA-OT and adds additional features to support Lightweight DITA.

It contains:

• a custom parser for Markdown and HTML to allow using MDITA and HDITA as a source document format,
• and a transtype to generate Markdown from DITA source.

The Markdown DITA files need to use a subset of Markdown constructs for compatibility with DITA content models.

Markdown DITA or HTML DITA topics can only be used by linking to them in map files.

<map>
  <topicref href="test.md" format="mdita"/>
  <topicref href="test.html" format="hdita"/>
</map>

The format attribute value must be set to mdita or hdita in order to recognize files as Markdown DITA or HTML DITA, respectively; the file extension is not used to recognize format.

See Syntax reference for XML and Markdown DITA correspondence.

The DITA-OT LwDITA plug-in extends the DITA Open Toolkit with additional output formats (transformation types) that can be used to publish DITA content as Markdown.

• To publish Markdown DITA files, use the markdown transtype.

• To generate GitHub Flavored Markdown files, use the markdown_github transtype.

• To publish GitHub Flavored Markdown and generate a SUMMARY.md table of contents file for publication via GitBook, use the markdown_gitbook transtype.

DITA-OT 2.2 is required. Earlier versions of DITA-OT do not have the required extension points.

1. Run the plug-in installation command:

   dita -install https://github.com/jelovirt/org.lwdita/releases/download/2.0/org.lwdita-2.0.zip
   

The dita command line tool requires no additional configuration; running DITA-OT using Ant requires adding plug-in contributed JAR files to the CLASSPATH with e.g. -lib plugins/org.lwdita.

To build the DITA-OT Markdown plug-in from source:

1. Install the DITA-OT distribution JAR file dependencies by running gradle install from your clone of the DITA-OT repository. The required dependencies are installed to a local Maven repository in your home directory under .m2/repository/org/dita-ot/dost/.

2. Run the Gradle distribution task to generate the plug-in distribution package:

   ./gradlew dist
   

   The distribution ZIP file is generated under build/distributions.

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DITA-OT LwDITA is licensed for use under the Apache License 2.0.