DITA. It’s a sunglasses brand, but it’s also an architecture for representing documentation. More than that, it’s something I understand as a concept, but haven’t had any chances to use. So, I thought I’d jump in.

Today is just Chapter 1. More like the introduction, really. I brushed up on the basics of DITA with a YouTube video and the Wikipedia article. But I really want to get my hands dirty — and dirty they got.

I decided to install the DITA Open Toolkit. I have some experience with command line, so I figured, why not? Well…

The documentation, while great (I’d expect nothing less), is geared towards people with a little more experience than I have. I downloaded DITA-OT and unzipped it (in the right place), easy-peasy. But then…

Ensure that you have a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK).

Haha. Okay. I can do that. This only took one Google search, but I got it sorted.

Next up…

Add the absolute path for the bin folder of the DITA-OT installation directory to the PATH environment variable.

Yeah, sure, let me just do that.

To figure this one out, I:

  • Read the Wikpedia article they linked. (Okay, I skimmed it, so what?)
  • Watched a YouTube video.
  • Asked ChatGPT for help. (Didn’t help.)
  • Paced.
  • Returned to the YouTube video — and, got it.

It wasn’t actually that hard. I just freak myself out when I mess around with Terminal. But, hey, nothing seems to be broken.

…and a note on that. I just returned from a 30 minute break to figure out why dita --version was no longer working. But don’t worry. ChatGPT and I figured it out. Back in action.

The most beautiful thing I’ve seen today? Easy.

~ % dita --version DITA-OT version 4.3.1

Stay tuned. I’ll post when I mess something else up.