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Coding guidelines
Please follow these guidelines when contributing changes to the DITA Open Toolkit docs.
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Use soft-tabs (spaces) with a two-space indent.
(They're the only way to guarantee code renders the same in any environment.) - Nested elements should be indented once (two spaces).
- Keep lines fewer than 120 characters.
(This prevents horizontal scrolling in GitHub edit & unified diff views.) - Use UTF-8 encoding.
- Trim trailing white space on save.
- End each file with a blank newline.
Note: Most of these preferences are defined in the oXygen project file and an .editorconfig file, so if you use oXygen to edit the docs or a tool that supports the EditorConfig convention, your editor should do the right thing.
The abbreviation for DITA Open Toolkit is “DITA-OT”, not DITA OT.
The options for the DITA-OT transformations are called “parameters”, not properties or arguments.
In earlier toolkit releases, the full distribution package was called the “full-easy-install package”. Recent toolkit releases provide a single distribution package, with a .tar.gz compressed version for UNIX-based operating systems and a .zip package for Windows.
Download the distribution package for your operating system from the project website at www.dita-ot.org.
DITA-OT output formats are called “transformation types”. Avoid abbreviating to “transtype” or “transform type” unless explicitly referring to elements or attributes by name:
The
<transtype>element defines an output format (transformation type).
Use <parmname> for the name of the parameter.
Use <option> for the permissable values for the parameter.
Use <option> for transformation types, as these are options passed to the transtype parameter.
Use <codeph> for Ant target names (as in processing modules topics).
Use <codeph>.
Use <msgnum>.
Use the IBM Style Guide.
Do not index container topics.
View the latest DITA Open Toolkit docs at www.dita-ot.org/dev.