DITA Open Toolkit Cloud Publishing

DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) Cloud replaces the original integration with the DITA-OT publishing engine in Heretto CCMS. If you have only worked with DITA-OT Cloud in Heretto CCMS, continue reading, you are in the right place. If you are looking for information about how to migrate from the legacy DITA-OT integration into DITA-OT Cloud, go to Migrating from Legacy DITA-OT to DITA-OT Cloud.

If you're interested in DITA-OT Cloud because you need to publish your content to PDF, you might want to consider using PDF Generator instead. PDF Generator is a more user-friendly publishing engine that uses CSS for output styling. Thanks to that, many teams can manage PDF output styling in-house without having to rely on consultants as it is often the case with DITA-OT.

Note: This document doesn't explain how to develop a custom plugin. We can recommend partners who provide DITA-OT customization services.

DITA-OT Cloud Benefits and Overview

Because the Heretto DITA-OT Cloud is a cloud solution, your publishing jobs do not compete for memory and processing resources in the CCMS. The benefit is that the system does not slow down, even when you are publishing a large publication or to multiple languages or output types.

The DITA-OT Cloud publishing engine provides you with the following benefits:

  • Publishing does not affect the CCMS performance as it happens in a separate space in the cloud
  • You can have parallel publishing (not available by default)
  • Modern, Google Chromeβ„’-compatible scenarios management interface

The default configuration for DITA-OT Cloud is one worker, which is equivalent to what the legacy DITA-OT integration offered. One worker can run one publishing job at a time. Additional jobs are queued and processed one by one as the worker completes jobs. For example, if your publishing job on average takes four minutes to publish and you start four publishing jobs, the first job will complete at four minutes, the second at eight minutes, with the fourth job completing at 16 minutes from the start. DITA-OT Cloud enables you to purchase more workers to run more publishing jobs at the same time, increasing throughput. Using the previous example, if you had four workers enabled, all jobs would run simultaneously and complete in four minutes.