The first time I installed the open source DITA Open Toolkit I ran the demo transformation and thought "great, now what?" It was all very Ant-driven, and while I know the basics of Ant I didn't know where to start with the fairly complex demo script.

I later found that the toolkit's ant subdirectory has some small, manageable templates for Ant build files, but meanwhile I discovered a jar file at the core of the toolkit that could be invoked from the command line with no need to write Ant files. This makes it easier to jump right in with using the toolkit with your own DITA documents, so I wrote up what I learned and the article Easy command line processing with the DITA Open Toolkit just went live on IBM developerWorks.