DITA Preferences

To access the DITA Preferences page, open the Preferences dialog box and go to DITA. This preferences page includes the following sections and options:

DITA Open Toolkit section

This section allows you to specify the default directory of the DITA Open Toolkit distribution (bundled with the Oxygen XML Author Eclipse plugin installation) to be used for validating and publishing DITA content. You can select from the following:

Built-in Oxygen Publishing Engine (based on DITA-OT 4.x)

Oxygen XML Author Eclipse plugin comes bundled with the Oxygen Publishing Engine (based on DITA-OT 4.2.3). By default, all defined DITA transformation/validation scenarios will run with this version. The default publishing engine directory is: [OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR]/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT.

Custom

Allows you to specify a custom directory for your DITA-OT distribution.

Location: You can either provide a new file path for the specific DITA-OT that you want to use or select a previously used one from the drop-down list. You can specify the path by using the text field, the Insert Editor Variables button, or the Browse button.

Important: Using a custom DITA Open Toolkit may disable certain features in the application. Examples of features that may not work properly:

If the custom DITA-OT is missing certain publishing plugins, default transformation scenarios such as DITA Map WebHelp Responsive or DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS may no longer work properly.
Validation of Markdown documents using Schematron may not work because it is based on a certain DITA Open Toolkit plugin.
The DITA framework (defined in the Preferences > Document Type Associations page) will use the XML catalogs specified in the DITA-OT configured in the Preferences > DITA page to perform the validation of all DITA topic types. If this DITA-OT is different from the one that comes bundled with the Oxygen XML Author Eclipse plugin default distribution, you might encounter validation-related issues.

CAUTION:

Oxygen XML Author Eclipse plugin support engineers do not officially offer support and troubleshooting assistance for custom DITA-OT distributions or custom installed DITA-OT plugins. If you discover any issues or inconsistent behavior while using a custom DITA-OT or a DITA-OT that contains custom DITA-OT plugins, you should revert to the default built-in DITA-OT.

Enable DITA 2.0 editing support (Experimental): If selected, you will have access to a DITA 2.0 folder in the New Document Wizard where you can find new document templates for creating DITA 2.0 maps or topics based on the DITA 2.0 standard DTDs. For example, in a DITA topic based on the DITA 2.0 DTDs, you can insert an <include> element that is not found in the DITA 1.3 DTDs.