Will OxygenXML Editor work for this workflow?

[LPBC]

Our code and our documentation are tightly interlinked, and when we build the product we want the documentation outputs to be built at the same time. These will be WebHelp (or something equivalently functional) and PDF.

I like the OxygenXML WebHelp outputs from DITA (I have tried this as a prototype experiment), but we are not going to use DITA. We currently have a large amount of well-structured XML with a custom DTD.

I have two basic questions:

1) Can we integrate Oxygen into an automated build process (or at least integrate the transformations into an automated build process)?

2) Can we use Oxygen to get to WebHelp without DITA or DocBook, but with our custom DTD?

[Radu]

Hi,

Please see some answers below:

1) Can we integrate Oxygen into an automated build process (or at least integrate the transformations into an automated build process)?

Most of the publishing from XML to a specific output format is usually made by applying XSLT transformations over the XML content.
You do not need to run Oxygen in order to apply generic XSLT transformations over XML documents in an automated process. You can do this using open source Java libraries like Saxon 6 or Saxon 8.

2) Can we use Oxygen to get to WebHelp without DITA or DocBook, but with our custom DTD?

One of the advantages of using a common XML vocabulary like DITA, Docbook or TEI is the fact that XSLT stylesheets (or more complex ANT processing in the case of DITA) for publishing have already been provided by the open source community which supports them.

You would need to write your own XSLT stylesheets or pipelines which publish your XML documents to another format. It is not a trivial work.

The DITA vocabulary allows for specializations, so hypothetically instead of using a custom DTD you could make a DITA specialization which uses the same XML elements as you are currently using. Such a specialization could be published to WebHelp using our builtin support and without any customization.

Or another way to handle the problem would be to write XSLT stylesheets which convert from your custom XML vocabulary to Docbook or DITA and then publish this intermediary output using the available publishing scenarios.

Regards,
Radu