DiType

DiType turns manuscripts into type. Built in and for the digital age, it presents the type in PDF, PostScript and other page description languages, and accepts manuscripts in a number of popular XML markup vocabularies.

DiType is a sophisticated program; it makes better type than a human typesetter would and produces layouts that would otherwise require a lot of tedious trial-and-error work.

The architecture of DiType is based on experience gathered during the lifetime of XEP and widely uses open technologies and protocols.

The heart of DiType is XSL FO rendering engine, accompanied by input format converters and output generators.

Specifications

DiType conforms to Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.0, a W3C recommendation. It also supports a subset of XSL 1.1 recommendation. DiType outputs formatted documents in Adobe PDF version 1.4 and PostScript level 3 formats.

DiType is written in Common Lisp (the core) and Python (the rest) and runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows XP, Mac OS X.

Usage

DiType architects designed the version with optimal performance for most uses. DiType is intended for use:

• as a personal tool by documentation authors, invoked manually as a command-line application, automatically from a Makefile or a batch build script, or via a plugin from an authoring environment of their choice;
• as a server component for on-demand rendering, used to process user requests and produce formatted reports;
• as a part of an automatic high-throughput publishing pipeline.

DiType is built from components connected by well-documented protocols. External interfaces are based on industry-standard protocols and APIs. These features provide for easy and efficient continued development of DiType through improvements in quality, performance and addition of new features. The project is expected to have a long life, and the software to be easily adaptable to customer needs.

Licensing Information

DiType is a combination of software and sample documents. DiType Trial is available for download for evaluation purposes only (excluding the commercialization of information technology products), subject to the terms of the Trial Software License Agreement.