Description: Ant is an open tool that the DITA Open Toolkit uses to manage builds.

# Running DITA-OT from Ant

Ant is an open tool that the DITA Open Toolkit uses to manage builds.

## Introduction to Ant

Ant is a Java-based, open source tool provided by the Apache Foundation to declare a sequence of build actions. It is well suited for development builds as well as document builds. The "Full Easy Install" version of the toolkit ships with a copy of Ant.

DITA provides a set of XSLT scripts for producing different types of documentation, such as help output in Eclipse, Java Help and HTML Help, XHTML pages, and PDF. The DITA-OT uses Ant to manage these scripts, as well as to manage additional intermediate steps written in Java.

- Running Ant
  After setting up the Ant environment, you can build the DITA output by running the `ant` command.
- Ant tasks and scripts
  This topic describes detailed Ant tasks and scripts.
- Ant argument properties for DITA-OT
  Reference list of DITA-specific Ant properties.

Parent topic: DITA Open Toolkit User Guide