Command for footnote?

[anderszvensson]

Hi,

Is there a command in Oxygen for easily inserting a footnote of type use-by-reference? These footnotes are rather complicated to insert manually. First you need to define the footnote, then give it an id, then insert xrefs in each place it is to be used, then insert the topicid followed by the footnote id (#topicid/footnoteid) in the href of the xref, and then add the attribute type="fn" to the xref...

Quite a lot of steps to ask non-technically inclined writers to do, so I was really hoping there would be an easy command for this in Oxygen, but I can't find anything about it in the online help.

Regards,

Anders

[Radu]

Hi Anders,

First of all, you can link to foot notes <fn> by using the Oxygen toolbar action Link->Cross reference, the same action used to insert a cross-reference to another topic or XML element.
From what I've tested, the type="fn" attribute is not required, the DITA Open Toolkit will determine the type of the target dynamically at transformation time.

Then, when the foot note gets inserted:

1) Either after the insertion (using the content completion support) the user right clicks in the <fn> and chooses "Generate IDs"
2) Or you can enable auto-ID generation for all inserted foot notes from the main DITA menu->ID Generation Options by adding in the list an entry like: topic/fn

You can also create a custom Author action for inserting foot notes and then contribute it to the toolbar/menus.

Regards,
Radu

[anderszvensson]

Great!

Speaking of the Auto-generate ID function, is there a way to change the type of id that is generated? I see there is some sort of syntax there (similar to the editor variables), but I don't understand it well enough to know how. E.g. could you specify that it should concatenate the first few words of the element content as id, using camel case? Is that possible?

Regards,

Anders

[anderszvensson]

Or, for example, the topic id, which at this point gets "conceptId" etc generated, could you change that to get "ConcatenatedWordsInTheTitle"?

Regards,

Anders

[anderszvensson]

EDIT:

It just hit me that I probably asked the question wrong:

Of course the id generation can't create an auto id from the text when you insert the element, because there is no text yet. What I really was after is a way to autogenerate id when you manually choose to insert or edit an id, like a button to press to generate the id based on the camel case criteria described above?

Regards,

Anders

[Radu]

Hi Anders,

We'll consider your request.
It can be done using the Java API available to developers but maybe we can perform out-of-the box such ID generation.
In the meantime your writers can also use the Alt-ENTER keyboard shortcuts to bring up the Edit Attributes in-place editor and set a determined value for the ID.

Regards,
Radu

[anderszvensson]

Great! I'd really appreciate such a feature if added.

Regards,

Anders