Job Description

Role: DITA OT Developer / DITA Content Strategist
Employment: Permanent
Location: Europe/UK - Remote
Core DITA & XML Skills

• DITA authoring concepts: topics, maps, specialization, constraints, reuse strategies.

• XML fundamentals: schemas (DTD, XSD), namespaces, validation.

• XSLT & XPath: customizing and writing transformations for DITA-OT outputs.

• DITA-OT plugins: creating and maintaining custom plugins for specialized publishing needs.

• DITA specialization: extending or restricting base DITA for domain-specific needs.

Programming & Markup

• Java & Ant: understanding DITA-OT's build framework, writing extensions.

• HTML5 & CSS3: styling web outputs.

• Regular expressions: text manipulation and validation tasks.

Publishing & Output Customization

• PDF publishing: PDF2 plugin, XSL-FO, or alternative PDF processors (Antenna House, RenderX, FOP).

• HTML publishing: customizing HTML5, CHM, WebHelp, or site outputs.

• Multi-channel publishing: knowledge of EPUB, Eclipse Help, Markdown, or custom outputs.

Tools & Environment

• DITA authoring tools: Oxygen XML Author/Editor, FrameMaker, Arbortext.

• DITA-OT build management: command line, Ant scripts, Gradle tasks.

• Source control: Git, SVN, or similar for managing content and customizations.

• Continuous Integration (CI/CD): integrating DITA-OT builds with Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, etc.

Quality & Testing

• DITA content validation: ensuring content adheres to DITA rules and constraints.

• Unit testing for transformations: validating XSLT and plugin changes.

• Performance optimization: tuning builds for large document sets.

Skills Required