Introduction

The objective of this project is to document, to the farthest level possible, every method, XSLT template, and Ant parameter that could be used to customize PDF or XHTML output generated from a ditamap or topic using DITA OT. Other output format transformations are not considered at this time (mainly excluded are the various Help formats: HTML Help, Java Help, and Eclipse Help).

Customizing DITA output has been mainly documented in Chapters 16 “Customizing your published output, p. 174” of the OT User Guide [1], with a backward reference to some generic Ant parameters in Chapter 9 “Processing (building) and publishing DITA documents > Ant Processing Parameters, p.92”

The methodology provided in Ch. 16 for XHTML:

Using own CSS
Overriding XSLT processing (modifying and replacing original XSLT files)
Customizing XHTML output (including headers & footers, and publishing as framesets)

And for PDF:

Overriding the Idiom plugin FO XSL Stylesheet processing, as described in ‘./demo/fo/Customization/README.txt'.

The following methods for customizing XHTML output are explained in [2], p. 41:

Modify CSS by creating additional sheets and adding appropriate properties to the ANT build script to associate it with XHTML
Add parameters to the ANT build file to specify headers & footers
Create custom (overriding) XSLT sheets

And for customizing Idiom FO (PDF2), in [2], p. 49:

Edit the ‘vars’ file
Modify CSS attribute sets
Modify master page layouts
Modify XSLT transformations

References

DITA Open Toolkit User Guide, Fourth Edition - December 3, 2007 - DITA Open Toolkit 1.4.1
Louise Kasemeier, DITA for SoloWriters, Lone-DITA, 2007