Thanks to some excellent work by the team of Anna van Raaphorst and Dick
Johnson, along with the comments, contributions, and permissions of many
others, the first public release of the DITA Open Toolkit User Guide (up to
date for DITA OT 1.2.2) is now available at this address:
http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/SourceForgeFiles/doc/user_guide.html

The URL is for a jumpoff page to the actual links for the Guide in various
forms, and should be a durable link for you to bookmark. The actual
filenames linked from that page may change as various new versions are
posted, so ideally you should bookmark only this entry page and then select
the deliverable you want.

I'm excited about this Open Toolkit Guide because it helps you understand
the function of the Toolkit, how to install it, evaluate it, tweak it, and
more. Anna has interviewed the experts and collected lots of good lore, and
Dick has tested it all out with the very tools that you'll be using, and of
course the deliverables were all done using the selfsame Toolkit. You too
can do this!

Note that we're talking about the DITA *Open Toolkit* User Guide, not a
*DITA* User Guide. For understanding DITA itself, there's the
well-acclaimed Comtech publication, Introduction to DITA: A Basic User
Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture
(http://www.comtech-serv.com/dita.shtml). The quintessential Language
Reference would be, of course, the OASIS standard DITA 1.0 Language
Specification,along with the DITA 1.0 Architectural Specification. Both
PDF and HTML versions of these are available from the OASIS DITA TC's web
site (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/15316/dita10.zip).
These materials have been handily interfaced for Web access by several
sites, notably http://ditamap.com and http://gotapi.com (Language Spec
only). The DITA Open Toolkit download is another place that includes the
OASIS Language Spec, this one built using an alternate map that presents
the elements by category. Along with the dita-users forum for
troubleshooting and the DITA Focus Area for best practices and community
(http://dita.xml.org), I think that documentation and assistance has come a
long way in this first year and a half of DITA's formal debut.

Because Anna and Dick contributed such outstanding effort and QC for this
addition to the DITA Open Toolkit, the open source spirit of meritocracy
applies: If you appreciate this effort as I do, let them know
personally--I think you can divine their contact info from the list or in
the DITA OT User Guide--, and please continue to help them to refine and
extend the information therein. I've seen some recent explanations of
processing for conrefs and conditionality that would be nice to capture and
expand on, for example. The goal is to maintain the information in the
Guide at the level of whatever is the current distribution of the Toolkit.
For everyone who has asked/pleaded/pestered me for a forthcoming guide for
the Toolkit, I could not have done it any better! Kudos to Anna and Dick.

In coming weeks we'll be refactoring the Project's web site to make it
easier to navigate, now that the documentation has finally come together in
ways that can be cited or accessed separately for writers and developers.

Finally, the source files are publicly available in the Project's CVS tree
at Sourceforge. As with all the other Toolkit materials on that site,
anyone can access them under the terms of the CPL or Apache licenses listed
on the project developer's home page
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot). Enjoy!

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
Email: dond@...
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-838-8550
T/L: 678-8550

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T.S. Eliot