/dita-bootstrapped

Style your DITA maps and topics with Twitter Bootstrap CSS

dita-bootstrapped

Style your DITA maps and topics with Twitter Bootstrap for a modern responsive page layout that tries to be readable and easy to navigate even on a widescreen display.

What else is DITA-Bootstrapped - why was it built?

DITA-Bootstrapped is an opinionated ongoing experiment on how to avoid building DITA franken-books by not just accepting the default output format often seen of one output page per DITA input topic and letting the poor reader assemble the puzzle by navigating a massive Table of Contents.

Apart from that ... it's just getting started so a lot is missing. It's probably not ready for big DITA help systems with several hundred DITA files just yet. But for delivering less than that it's beginning to be useable. Take a look at the examples below

Examples - what does it look like?

Built incrementally one user story at a time:

  • HelloWorld, a classical minimal example. Output from just one single DITA task. This does unfortunately NOT illustrate the main point of assembling several DITA topics into more meaningful pages. Still it demonstrates the adjustable terseness feature dita-bootstrapped provides ... and it gets us of the ground!

  • KitchenSink Emergent ;-) A recipe for stepwise refactoring existing DITA sources to get them Bootstrap-ified by: 1) Tweak the .ditamap to chunk the 20 .dita sources into just 5 pages 2) TODO: breaking up sections etc. in big files, 3) TODO: adding shortdesc based progressive disclosure for findability

  • To be continued... but you can participate by adding or fixing issues, or just comment on the existing issues to have your say on what's important or even fork this thing and scratch your own itches

How to build your own

  1. Clone or download dita-bootstrapped
  2. Install ditac which requires Java on your machine
  3. Run ditac -t xhtml.xsl out/comparing-baselines.html comparing-baselines.dita to build the HelloWorld example
  4. Admire out/comparing-baselines.html with your browser - which is the result you just built

Thank you & license stuff

The DITA-Bootstrap stylesheet is derived from ditac which is under a MPL 1.1 license

The "DITA for the Impatient" source files used in the KitchenSink example above are written by Hussein Shafie and is licensed under the CC-BY-SA

Well, and Bootstrap of course, which is under the Apache License

Thanks for sharing useful stuff!