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Possibilities to obtain PDF from DITA

Radu Coravu
Read time: 3 minute(s)
Lately while attending Tekom 2015 and DITA OT Day 2015 I happened to come across two more DITA to PDF solutions that I did not know about so I tried to compile below a list of all DITA to PDF possibilities that I know of, along with some details:
  • DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS. This commercial plugin is developed and maintainced by Oxygen as an alternative to the default PDF publishing. It allows styling the DITA content using CSS and publishing to PDF using our own Chemistry engine or other commercial solutions like Prince XML or Antenna House.
  • Default DITA to PDF solution embedded in the DITA Open Toolkit distribution. Besides Apache FOP you can also use RenderX XEP or Antenna House for publishing. It's customization can be done either via a plugin or via a PDF customization folder: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-editor/index.html#topics/dita_pdf_output_customization.html.
  • Antenna House DITA OT plugin for producing PDF from DITA using Antenna House. There is also a DITA specialization plugin which allows you to set specific formatting attributes directly to DITA elements.
  • The TopLeaf XML Publisher commercial product allows you to produce various outputs like PDF and EPUB from XML content. The application also has a visual PDF layout formatter, it comes also with a DITA OT plugin and has installation instructions for Oxygen:https://turnkey.com.au/topleaf-downloads/.
  • Miramo, again a commercial solution which recently started developing support for DITA using a DITA OT plugin. Possibly user based DITA to PDF publishing will be free and server based production will require buying a license. Like TopLeaf, it also has a visual PDF layout designer.
  • Adobe FrameMaker can also publish to PDF using its own solution.

Now the question would be, why there are so many solutions available? In my opinion all these solutions are available because the default DITA to PDF output still requires quite a lot of XSLT skills in order to customize.

What do you think?