Events
• DITA-OT Day - Brussels 2026
February 1, 2026
Welcome to the DITA-OT Day 2026!
Once again, Oxygen XML Editor is proud to host the DITA-OT Day conference, the full-day event dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit project -
the reference DITA implementation and the core of almost all DITA-based publishing solutions!
Building on the success of previous editions, DITA-OT Day will hold its 10th edition on February 1, 2026, in Brussels, Belgium.
This on-site event will serve as the pre-conference day for DITA Europe, making it convenient for attendees to participate in
both conferences back-to-back. Both events will be held at the Le Plaza Hotel Brussels.
This free event is brought to you by Oxygen XML
Editor with the help of the following DITA-OT Day supporters:
Preliminary Agenda
We are re still accepting speaker proposals!
If you’d like to share your experience, insights, or innovations with the DITA community, we invite you to submit your session idea.
| Welcome and sponsor presentation |
DITA-OT Day Sponsors
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News and announcements
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DITA-OT Day Team
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Ten Years of DITA Open Toolkit
Since this conference series began, the toolkit has gone through many changes and added a long list of new features.
In this session, we will look back at some of the big features that should be of interest.
This session will be particularly useful to those who may not always update their version right away;
if your upgrade schedule runs a couple of years behind the official release, new feature announcements will already be long gone and those features are easy to miss.
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DITA-OT Day Team
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A decade of docs
This year’s DITA-OT Day marks the 10th edition of this community event.
We'll take this opportunity to reflect on how the DITA-OT documentation has evolved over the years, and where it could go from here.
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Roger Sheen
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Fun practical metadata plug-ins
Discover practical ways to leverage metadata with DITA Open Toolkit plug-ins.
Go beyond HTML or PDF outputs — imagine plug-ins that generate QR codes for instant reference in a PDF file,
create Excel summaries for clear analysis, and JSON outputs that integrate with your delivery platforms.
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Pieterjan Vandenweghe
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Building to Fluid Topics: How we did it and why
Outlines how our new Fluid Topics FTML build process works, including constructing pretty URLs using classifications applied externally
and capturing the URLs in order to track URL changes over time.
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Eliot Kimber
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Using the DITA OT Docs with AI to Create Plugins
A model context protocol server can be created over a WebHelp site published from the DITA Open Toolkit documentation.
An application using the MCP support can thus be instructed to create a DITA Open Toolkit plugin by searching for related content in the DITA Open Toolkit documentation.
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Radu Coravu
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What will this cost me - evaluating the work ahead for a migration to 2.0
DITA 2.0 is coming, and you will need to migrate if you want to take advantage of any new features.
But what will that migration cost? This session will present a DITA-OT plugin that you can run over
your content to get a report on the changes ahead. It will create a report of any content structures
that need to be migrated, to help you determine how much (or how little) work is ahead.
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Robert D. Anderson
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Making the DITA OT Add Up: MathML Support
MathML has been a part of the DITA specification v1.3 but has never been natively supported in the DITA Open Toolkit. Bentley Systems developed a plugin to support MathML output for HTML and PDF as well as implementing a means to provide high-quality output using MathJax rendering into SVG graphics during publishing time. This reduces the need for end uses to rely on CDNs or other JavaScript in HTML. This methodology can extend to other areas outside of MathML, as well.
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Jason Coleman
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Sometimes It’s Just Hard (to Implement): Why Some DITA-OT Features Remain Out of Reach
Ever wondered why certain highly requested features—like running DITA Open Toolkit from a single JAR, true incremental publishing, or other long-desired capabilities—still aren’t available in DITA-OT?
This talk takes a candid look at the technical and community challenges behind these “missing” features.
We’ll explore specific examples, break down the complexities that make them difficult to implement, and discuss the real-world constraints faced by open source projects with limited contributors.
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Jarno Elovirta
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Pay No Attention to the Chunker Behind the Curtain
DITA 1.x chunking code is hard to maintain. DITA 2.0 code is cleaner and easier to reason about.
The solution? Detect when 1.x documents are compatible with 2.0 chunking and silently use the better implementation.
We're replacing engines mid-flight, swapping horses mid-stream, and refactoring production code—all the things they tell you never to do.
Learn how we're routing compatible content through the better chunker while keeping the old one on standby for edge cases.
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Jarno Elovirta
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From Maps to Models: How DITA-OT Powers Ontology-Ready Content for AI and Beyond. Making Topic Maps First-Class Graph Models
During this presentation, I will speak about gaps and open problems with DITA-OT.
While DITA-OT is mature, there are still non-visible gaps when applying it for ontology-based information architecture for different business domains.
This presentation will create opportunities for the community members to strengthen DITA-OT’s role in the Linked Data ecosystem
and how they can participate in future roadmap discussions.
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Amit Siddhartha
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Ten Years of DITA-OT Day
When SyncroSoft proposed the first DITA-OT Day, many of the core developers were not sure how many people would come.
Now in our tenth year, it is incredible to look back and see how many people have come and presented their own work around the project.
This session will summarize and look back at what we've learned at our ten conferences —
what types of plugins have our contributors made available? How many different ways is the toolkit being used?
What is the best way to learn from our past events?
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DITA-OT Day Team
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Future Plans |
DITA OT Day team
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Call For Proposals
Deadline: November 30, 2025
As we get ready for the 10th annual DITA-OT Day, we want
to hear from you! Along with the usual updates on new features
and plans, this year we want to focus on the people and teams
using DITA-OT. We expect to have a mix of short lightning talks
and longer, in-depth sessions; subjects range from technical talks
about plugin development to high level overviews about deploying
or managing DITA-OT within an organization. We are looking for
speakers on anything related to DITA-OT; sample topics might include:
- If your team is new to DITA, do you have any recent stories about adopting DITA-OT? What went right, what went wrong ?
- Deploying DITA-OT within an organization: how do you manage roll out of DITA-OT to your team, whether that's a team of five, or a team of five hundred ?
- Managing DITA-OT: what skills are required to support your use of DITA-OT, and how do you find those skills ?
- Testing DITA-OT: do you have any local testing frameworks to share (for DITA-OT itself, for custom extensions, or both) ?
- Custom plugin development: do you have any fancy styles or output formats to show off and share ?
- If DITA-OT is just one part of a larger workflow, how do you ensure all the parts keep working together ?
- Do you have any stories about using DITA-OT and Lightweight DITA to publish content from both professional authors and developers ?
- If you've worked with companies who use DITA-OT differently, what do some get right, what do some get wrong ?
- Anything else we're missing? If it's related to DITA Open Toolkit, we'd like to hear your ideas !
You can submit your proposal using the link below, before November 30:
We look forward to seeing you in Brussels!
Location
Boulevard Adolphe Max 118-126
1000 Brussels, Belgium
Tel.: +32 2 278 01 00
