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<!DOCTYPE concept PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Concept//EN" "concept.dtd">
<!--  This file is part of the DITA Open Toolkit project. See the accompanying LICENSE file for applicable license.  -->
<concept id="processing-structure">
  <title>Processing structure</title>
  <shortdesc>DITA-OT implements a multi-stage, map-driven architecture to process DITA content. Each stage in the
    process examines some or all of the content; some stages result in temporary files that are used by later steps,
    while others stages result in updated copies of the DITA content. Most of the processing takes place in a temporary
    working directory; the source files themselves are never modified.</shortdesc>
  <prolog>
    <metadata>
      <keywords>
        <indexterm>architecture</indexterm>
        <indexterm>pre-processing</indexterm>
        <indexterm>Eclipse Help</indexterm>
        <indexterm>HTML Help</indexterm>
        <indexterm>XHTML</indexterm>
        <indexterm>PDF</indexterm>
        <indexterm>HTML5
          <indexterm>pre-processing</indexterm></indexterm>
        <indexterm>pipelines
          <indexterm>description of</indexterm></indexterm>
        <indexterm>pipelines
          <index-see-also>pre-processing</index-see-also></indexterm>
      </keywords>
    </metadata>
  </prolog>
  <conbody>
    <p>DITA-OT is designed as a pipeline. Most of the pipeline is common to all output formats; it is known as the
        <term>pre-processing stage</term>. In general, any DITA process begins with this common set of pre-processing
      routines.</p>
    <p>Once the pre-processing is completed, the pipeline diverges based on the requested output format. Some processing
      is still common to multiple output formats; for example, Eclipse Help and HTML Help both use the same routines to
      generate XHTML topics, after which the two pipelines branch to create different sets of navigation files.</p>
    <p>The following image illustrates how the pipeline works for several common output formats: PDF, Eclipse Help, HTML
      Help, XHTML, and HTML5.</p>
    <note>Other output formats may implement additional processing steps.</note>
    <fig>
      <title>Diagram of some possible paths through the transformation pipeline</title>
      <image href="images/processing-flow.svg" placement="break" width="6.5in"/>
    </fig>
  </conbody>
</concept>
