CSS XSL for DITA2PDF

[JeffHendricks]

Hello,

I work in the publishing industry and I use oXygen for a wealth of tasks and development assignments. My current assignment calls for me to modify the DITA-OT pdf2 output from the generic 'Out of the Box' template and make some modifications to the styling and pagination of the PDF output to make it more 'book-like'.

My Questions:

1. Where is the CSS that controls the PDF styles that are output for the DITA2PDF transform?
2. Where can I find the XSL and it's corresponding attribute sets for laying out the PDF output?
3. Control of font base fonts...all we need is serif

I'm on oXygen 16.0 since July 24, 2014, Mac 16GB RAM, Intel i7

Any help or direction you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!
Jeff

[Radu]

Hi Jeff,

The DITA OT PDF output can only be customized by making XSLT customization (so CSS stylesheets are not involved at all in obtaining the PDF output).

Usually the XSLT customizations should be done by creating a customization folder or a customization plugin:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-oxygen/ ... ation.html

The font mappings in the DITA OT PDF output work something like this:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-oxygen/ ... tails.html

There is also a good book available for purchase called DITA For Print:
http://www.amazon.com/Dita-Print-Open-T ... 1937434052

which should cover many aspects of PDF customization.

Regards,
Radu

[JeffHendricks]

Um...yeah, I've seen those...those links did not address my questions.

1. Where does the styling for the PDF output get generated from...this is a uri

2. Where are the attribute sets and their corresponding layouts?...this is a uri

3. Font-mapping...got it.

Of course it works for you, but it doesn't for me and copy/pasting links I've been pouring over is getting me no where, so if you could please provide the URI's to #'s 1 & 2, that's all I'm asking.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Radu]

Hi Jeff,

It depends on what exactly you want to customize. We do not have very much information about customizations in our user's manual because the DITA Open Toolkit is an open source engine, for example there is a DITA Users List on which you can also register and ask DITA publishing related questions.

There are a couple of XSLT stylesheets which contain quite a lot of values which can be customized.
For example:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/org.dita.pdf2/cfg/fo/attrs/basic-settings.xsl

contains information about the page layout and font size.

The XSLT:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/org.dita.pdf2/cfg/fo/attrs/commons-attr.xsl

contains attribute sets for styling various elements like topic titles.

The attribute sets defined in the XSLT stylesheets from the OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/org.dita.pdf2/cfg/fo/attrs/ folder are then referred in the XSLT templates which match each DITA element and produce XSL-FO output from them.

Regards,
Radu

[JeffHendricks]

Thank you so much. This is perfect, a production and learning tool.

Many Thanks again,
J