DITA: Running the DITA Open Toolkit on a shared drive

[Su-Laine Yeo]

Products: XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.5 and later

Background
If you want to configure the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) and have everyone on your team use exactly the same configured version, you can put a copy of the DITA OT on a shared drive and point XMetaL Author Enterprise to it.

Procedure
Say you want the shared copy of the DITA OT to be on the “R:” drive. Here is how to do it:

1) Start XMetaL Author Enterprise.
2) Click Tools > Configure Output.
3) Click the Advanced tab.
4) In the “Other output parameters” box, add the following line:
[code]DITA_OT_BUILD_DIR  =  R:EXTERNAL_OT[/code]
5) Click OK. This parameter is saved from session to session, so you only have to set it once per machine.

The next time you generate output, XMetaL will copy the “DITA_OT”, “renderx”, and “saxon” folders from C:Program FilesCommon FilesXMetaL Shared to R:EXTERNAL_OT. If those folders already exist, XMetaL will not copy them again.

If the “EXTERNAL_OT” folder does not exist on the R: drive, XMetaL will create it. If you are installing the OT and RenderX XEP on a shared drive, make sure that each user of the OT has an XEP license (an XEP license is included with each license of XMetaL Author Enterprise).

For the OT to work, each user must have permissions to write to the shared drive. The shared location must begin with a drive letter.

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[Su-Laine Yeo]

Note that if more than one person runs the DITA OT from a shared drive at the same time, there will be problems, because changes that are automatically made to files within the DITA OT folder whenever output is generated. If you must allow more than one person to use the OT from a shared drive, make sure there is some kind of proper time coordination between them.

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