Publishing 2 Guides From One Map

BentCat · Post by **BentCat** » Thu Sep 14, 2023 10:10 pm

We currently produce an online help guide which in oxygen is comprised of a master map (or book map), inside of which are numerous child maps, and inside of those are the individual topics. We currently publish it off as an online help module or huge pdf file.
In addition, we publish from a separate map using separate topics a separate revision history document that pretty much mirrors the structure of the online help module. Any topic that is added or touched in the online help module requires an entry in our separate revision history document.
Right now we are doing the work twice. Creating the topics in the online help module's many maps. And then summarizing what we did in a separate rev history document.
Keeping everything straight is a logistics nightmare and a waste of time. It would be much better from a writing, quality, and review standpoint to have one topic that would feed both guides by turning on and off the necessary sections via ditavals.
The dream is that I would create the online help module as I normally would, but those topics that were updated would also get a section within the topic that would be tagged for the rev history document. When the online help module is published we could exclude the rev history content easy enough via ditavals. I would imagine that the rev history content would be tucked within otherprops tags, though there are probably many ways to go about this.
The question is how would you from that same map publish only content tagged rev history? It appears that ditvals do not permit an "exclude everything except for this" feature.
There has to be a way to do what I'm describing, but wasn't sure how to proceed.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

Post by **Radu** » Fri Sep 15, 2023 7:48 am

Hi,
If you want advice from the DITA community I would suggest registering and asking this question on the DITA Users List:
https://dita-users.groups.io/g/main
The Oxygen forum is a more static place, most people who register on the forum do not opt in to receive notifications for all posts, they are interested only in getting answers on their posts.
About the DITAVAL file, it can specify a rule like this:

<prop action="exclude"/>
<prop action="include" att="rev"/>

but this means something like "exclude all elements which have profiling attributes defined on them, no matter what value those profiling attributes have".
As you said there is no "exclude all elements with no profiling attributes set on them" rule. This would not work anyway, in a topic like this:

Code: Select all

<topic>
  <title>
  <body>
     <p>para text to exclude
     <p rev="1">para2 text to include

from the very beginning the root topic element which does not have profiling attributes set on it would get filtered out and with it everything else.
I'm not sure what to advise you, who reads these revision history parallel documents anyway? Are they useful to the end user?
Regards,
Radu

BentCat · Post by **BentCat** » Fri Sep 15, 2023 4:07 pm

Thanks Radu!

Publishing 2 Guides From One Map

Publishing 2 Guides From One Map

Re: Publishing 2 Guides From One Map

Re: Publishing 2 Guides From One Map