change bars setting for change tracking

[shudson310]

Now that DITA-OT supports change bars (using @rev and configured using ditaval) for AntennaHouse and XEP, it would be really nice to have a setting where Change Tracking (if enabled) could also set the value of @rev on the appropriate containing element for the change. This way, you could easily create a PDF for subject matter experts or other reviewers that could quickly direct them to changes in the document.

The setting could also control deletion of the @rev once the changes have been accepted or rejected. They could be kept for future use, or removed to clean the content based on the setting.

[Radu]

Hi Scott,

Actually the DITA @status attribute would be more appropriate for this task:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os ... -atts.html

So if you were to do this manually you would set on a modified paragraph status="changed" and rev='1.0' to indicate that the paragraph has changed in revision 1.0.

The problem is that you cannot flag the output content based on the @status attribute, you can only flag it based on @rev.

Also there are certain problems with automatically setting the @status attribute when change tracking is enabled. For example if you delete an entire element using Oxygen's change tracking, it gets serialized completely to a processing instruction. So it will disappear completely from the output, you will not be able to style it in any way.

Regards,
Radu

[shudson310]

Thanks, Radu. We've had a lot of requests to be able to print change bars / change markup in PDF for reviewers that are not using a CMS or oXygen (even though the source is created in a CMS with oXygen). Are there any stylesheet inclusions that oXygen provides for the change tracking to PDF output (AH or XEP)? We can create customizations, but I don't want to re-create it if it is already available.

[Radu]

Hi Scott,

You can find a detailed answer here:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/forum/post32282.html#p32282

Regards,
Radu