Do you want to publish your family history, local history, or biographical works in print or as a professionally formatted PDF? You can try using Word or other desktop publishing tools, but you'll quickly find that most of these tools are sorely lacking in features that you'd find in a "proper" book.

The DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) is a free, open source, framework for publishing content written in the DITA XML format. While this is not a common application found on the average computer, it has been used for the past 20+ years for producing complex technical documentation by software and hardware companies. By default, it supports most of the features that are needed for publishing professional documentation. With just a bit of enhancement it can also support the features needed by genealogists and historians. You can use this tool to generate a PDF that's "print-ready" .. just upload to lulu.com or other print on demand services, to get your book in print!

After years of using DITA and the DITA-OT to produce technical documentation, we've developed a DITA-OT plugin that adds those extra features to make it appropriate for genealogists and historians. We also have developed a "framework" for the Oxygen XML Editor that helps to make working with DITA XML files a but less daunting and complicated. Note that there are free authoring tools that support DITA, and technically you can use any XML editor, but Oxygen is well worth the cost (academic licenses are available) and it simplifies the whole process from authoring to publishing. We will be posting videos showing its use, and are more than happy to help you with any setup or use issues.

To help get you started, we are working on a WikiTree tool that will export profile data for a specified number of generations of ancestors from a selected individual to DITA XML. We have plans to also offer a WikiTree export for descendants as well. Eventually, we hope to have tools available to generate DITA files from GEDCOM.

This is all still very much under development, but if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please contact us, to learn more and to help test these tools!

net.iroots.pdf plugin

PDF plugin for the DITA-OT. Provides specialized support for generating print-ready PDFs from DITA for genealogists, historians, and biographers.

• Cover page with custom image
• Title page and copyright page
• Other optional frontmatter pages
• Supports custom styling of content.
• Table of contents
• Figure list
• Preface, dedication, etc.
• Variable column count in frontmatter, body pages, and backmatter.
• Images: inline, float left or right, full width.
• "Family style" numbering in numbered lists (for genealogies).
• Ability to start numbered lists at specified numbers.
• Footnotes
• Index and other backmatter.
• Back cover (available soon).
• Other features to be added.