Generating Documents with command-line tool

How to generate documents from the command line with the DITA-OT command-line tool.

The DITA Open Toolkit provides a command-line tool to run document conversions. However, the command-line tool 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 command-line tool

  1. Open a command prompt.
  2. Change directories to where you installed the DITA Open Toolkit.
  3. Set up the processing environment. Enter the following command:
    startcmd.bat
  4. Run a convertion to a transformation output type. Enter the following command:
    java -jar lib/dost.jar [arguments]

    Three arguments are required:

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

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

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