Installing plug-ins Plug-ins are generally distributed as zip files. There are two steps to installing a plug-in: unzipping and integrating.

It is possible to define a plug-in so that it may be installed anywhere, although most expect to be placed in plugins/ directory inside of the DITA-OT. Most plug-ins do not require a specific install directory and can go in either of the default locations, but some may come with instructions for a particular install directory.

 The unzip the plug-in file to plugins subdirectory. The plug-in directory should be named after plug-in ID and version, for example plugins/com.example.xhtml_1.0.0. Run plug-in integration process. From the toolkit directory, run the following command to integrate all installed plug-ins: ant -f integrator.xml Any build that uses the Java command line interface automatically runs the integrator before processing begins. Ant based builds may import the integrator.xml file, and add integrate to the start of the dependency chain for the build. The integration process in considered part of the installation process and running it before each conversion will incur a performance penalty.

The integration process has two modes, lax and strict. In the strict mode the integration process will immediately fail if it encounters errors in plug-in configurations or installation process. In the lax mode, the integration process will continue to finish regardless of errors; the lax mode does not imply error recovery and may leave the DITA-OT installation into a broken state. The default mode is lax due to backwards compatibility, to run the integration in strict mode:

ant -f integrator.xml strict

To get more information about the integration process, run Ant in verbose mode:

ant -f integrator.xml -verbose strict