About the Java Command Line Interface

Introduction to using generating documents with Java

The DITA Open Toolkit provides a Java interface for organizations that automate their document as part of a Java build. However, the Java interface is a wrapper for the Ant interface, so you still must install Ant. In addition, only a subset of the Ant properties are supported by the Java interface.

Three of the Java properties are required:

/i: defines the location of the .ditamap file for your document
/outdir: defines the director where the output resides after DITA-OT finishes processing your project
/transtype: defines the type of document you want to generate for the project.

For example, the following command instructs DITA-OT to build the samples project as a PDF in the out directory:

java -jar lib/dost.jar /i:samples/sequence.ditamap /outdir:out /transtype:pdf

See Ant Build Properties for DITA-OT for descriptions of all supported properties.

Tip: The Java interface for DITA-OT does not currently support multiple threads. If your automated build script requires multi-threaded programming, you must use the Ant interface instead.