Adding org.dita.text and org.dita.text-asciiart plugins

[gdelory]

Description

Adding two new plugins to support a DITA to Text transform

Motivation and Context

DITA to Text transform is a niche transform, but was a requirement for IBM for mainframe and zOS, we decided to give back to the community in case it can be used by others, in hope that we can improve it as a community.

How Has This Been Tested?

Test files are part of the plugins, for now the validation is a visual check of the Text output, I plan to add an automated test comparison with a baseline in the future.

Type of Changes

• New plug-ins

Documentation and Compatibility

See READMEs of both plug-in for documentations:
https://github.com/gdelory/org.dita.text
https://github.com/gdelory/org.dita.text-asciiart

[jelovirt]

Because these are not developed by DITA-OT project itself, the ID should not use org.dita prefix. Please use something else, e.g. com.github.gdelory

[gdelory]

Hi @jelovirt, anyway to make an exception here, here are my few reasons:

1. the approval process at IBM is very long (it took me 3 months to go through to be able to contribute to the DITA-OT project again), and we (IBM) usually don't contribute to project personally when worked on during IBM time, but to the project itself. I'm not sure I would be allowed to contribute those plugins under my own ID. I am already not sure I'm even allowed to host them under personal GitHub ID instead of the project's GitHub organization.
2. Now that I (i.e. my team as well) have approval to contribute again, I'm hoping to get more IBM time to contribute to the DITA-OT, meaning I would hope at some point we can consider IBM as part of the DITA-OT contributors, meaning those plugin, even if maintained by IBM only at first, would still be maintained by the DITA-OT project if we assume we are counted as regular contributors in the future.
3. This is not a plugin adding a small extra feature, but a new transform type, as for PDF/HTML/EclipseHelp/JavaHelp, and all those main transform types are under org.dita. Text is still a basic output type, that even if not included in the base distribution, can easily be used by anyone and it would make sense the plugin for it is named as the other transform (JavaHelp is also not included in the base distribution)

Let me know, I'll be on the DITA-OT monthly call on Thursday as well if you want to discuss this directly instead of texting back and forth 😉