Convert DITA RNG Customization to DTD

[mknebel]

We have recently customized a DITA framework for Oxygen using RNG schema instead of DTD in the form of a DITA-OT plugin.

We had no need to specialize any elements or attributes and only constrained the original definitions. Customizing the RNG schema was quite easy and proved to work well within Oxygen and as DITA-OT plugin (with a few glitches regarding custom Oxygen actions here and there).

However, our customer now wants to publish to HTML and PDF using WebWorksPublisher, which does not seem to support RND schema (or any type of XML schema).

I am unsure which is the best option to modify our existing framework so that it works with Oxygen and WWP. I see the following options:


1. Automatically convert RNG to DTD.
I tried the converter Trang converter integrated in Oxygen, but it fails because of the numerous occurences of <combine> in the RNG files. Getting rid of those seems to be as much work as customizing the DTD again.
2. Manually customize the DITA-DTDs to achieve the same setup as now.
This is my least favorite option because of the effort involved. Also, I am not sure if we can achieve exactly the same definition, because the RNG offers different possibilities to define things.
3. Use the XML catalog to resolve a DTD doctype declararation to an RNG schema.
I have no idea if this is even possible. But if we could use doctype declarations with default DITA public identifiers, but still validate those using the custom RNG schemas inside Oxygen, our problem would be solved. I am no expert in XML catalogs, the following simple approach didn't work:

<public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DITA Concept//EN" uri="rng/concept.rng"/>

4. Use a script to replace the system identifier pointing to the RNG schemas with the default DITA public identifier prior to production.
This solution is simple, but more of a hack, and our customer would prefer a cleaner approach.
5. Use some other mechanism than constraining the DTD to filter the available elements and attributes in Oxygen.

As our main goal was to simplify the structures and restrict the choice of elements and attributes during the authoring, this might also work. It would also make the solution completely tool-depended, but that I would leave for the customer to decide.


I am open to all ideas and thoughts on how to solve this problem efficiently. First of all, I would like to know whether there is a solution for option 1, and whether 3 and 5 are possible at all. Did I miss any other good options?

PS: Best regards
Marion Knebel

I will also post this on the dita-users Yahoo group.

[Radu]

Hi Marion,

For completion, link to your equivalent post on the DITA Users List below:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dit ... pics/37002

George Bina will try to also reply to this post separately.

Regards,
Radu