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Hurdle #1

I have the DITA-OT downloaded onto my machine, which contains a version of the DITA schemas and DTDs.  
First, I downloaded DITA OT 1.4.2.1 from sourceforge and selected the file called DITA-OT1.4.2.1_full_easy_install_bin.zip.  I unzipped it to a project home directory on my machine.

Looking in the newly created directory "DITA-OT1.4.2.1", I notice two licences, the Common Public License - v 1.0  and the Apache License - Version 2.0.  Both are pretty permissive, and allow me to do more or less what I want.  I am not redistributing the code, or packaging it in any way, but if I did, I'd have to also include copies of the licences with the source.  Since I'm just using, there doesn't seem to be any conflict with what I want to do.  I do so love free stuff.

The only problem is it doesn't work right away.  

I tried to build the samples, but the DOTA-OT requires a Java Archive (.jar) called tools.jar and complains bitterly because I don't have it.  It takes a little looking, but it's because I have only the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which allows me to run Java.  I need the Java Development Kit (JDK), which has the complier (javac) and tools.jar.  So I went ahead to Sun and got the Java SE Development Kit 6u11.   I have no idea if this version of Java will work with that version of the DITA-OT, but I'm going to try it and find out.

Well, Java installed fine, but there's still some complaining about the DITA-OT not finding C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar.  There is a tools.jar in C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11\lib, where the default install of Java placed it.

So I'll take the brute force approach and just copy it into the first path so that it's in both places.  Feel free to comment to tell me the "correct" way to do this.

I start the demo and type in "ant all -f build_demo.xml",  a bunch of text later, I have a message saying 
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 minute 36 seconds
Note:  The DITA-OT use Apache Ant for controlling the build, so if you are familiar with that, this message is no suprise.

I now have the demo built, but I'm not building the demo. I want to make my own stuff.  The easiest way to do this would be to replace the demo source with my own stuff and keep building the "demo", but I'm too stubborn for that.  I want to make my own stuff.  So I'll make a "src" directory to hold my stuff and try to make DITA-OT build from there.


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