Creating DITA topic in existing project

[pbw]

While I was experimenting with adding dita4publishers plugins to the Oxygen OT installation, an attempt to create a topic resulted in an error. The file topic.dtd could not be found, as it was being sought in one of the directories of the project. If, on the other hand, I create a new project, I can successfully create a topic file, and have it open in Author.

I don't think this is mentioned in the documentation, and, because I had modified the OT installation, I went on a wild goose chase until I was convinced that the problem also occurred with a clean installation of Oxygen.

[Radu]

Hi,

In order to validate the DITA topics Oxygen tries to resolve the DTDs PUBLIC IDs using the catalogs support. Usually each framework (document type) contributes with a catalog file so if you modified the catalog-dita.xml to take your specialization into account this should be enough.
Did you have catalog files set up at project level?

I do not quite understand what you did, maybe you can give me some precise steps.

Regards,
Radu

[pbw]

Radu,

When I first noticed this, I was working on CVs in a project which had hr-xsl, HR-XML, various other directories, and some résumés. I also had a catalog file for resolving the HR-XML and hr-xsl schemas.

About the same time, I was reading about DITA, and dita4publishers, so I added the current dita4publishers plugins into the Oxygen dita framework. I then tried to create a dummy DITA topic file, _while my existing project was open_.

That's when first saw the error. I then found that if I created a new, empty project, I could create a DITA topic file without the problem.

Generally, I suppose, people will be creating a new project for DITA files, and won't strike this problem. However, it is possible someone may want to add dita components to an existing project. In that case, it would be useful to include a note in the documentation about the way Oxygen and the OT try to resolve public ids.

Does that explain it better?

[Radu]

Hi,

Thanks for the details.

Regards,
Radu