Cross-referencing DITA map titles

[ACH]

Hi,

I maintain a DITA-based documentation publishing system for a set of technical authors. The publishing system contains both standard DITA processing as well as additional (hacky!) ad-hoc processing.
I am trying to reduce the amount of ad-hoc processing we do, and as part of that I am looking to replace our existing XREF process with a standard DITA process, and, since I have not been able to think of a good solution myself, have come to this forum.

Could you please have a look at the details below and let me know if you can think of a standard DITA solution for the requirement? Alternatively, if you think there is a better venue for this sort of question (DITA mailing list?) I would be happy to hear about that, too.

-- Thanks,
ACH

Details

The basic requirement is to give authors the ability to cross-reference from a topic used in one manual to a topic in another manual in a way that includes the title of that other manual.
For example, if there is a topic WarblingTheWidget.dita in a manual (=ditamap) called Widget User's Guide, then it needs to be possible to refer to another topic WidgetSetup.dita that is referenced in the manual Widget Installation Guide in a way that lets the person reading know where to find the WidgetSetup topic. So for example (and this is what our current system does) it could be rendered into text as:

Code: Select all

... Further details may be found in "How to set up the widget"] in the "Widget Installation guide". 

The problem I am having with this is that I am not sure how to reliably reference the target manual as part of the XREF - in this case the "Widget installation Guide".

[Radu]

Hi,

So this is about cross-publication linking, right?
Eliot Kimber proposed such a system in DITA 1.3:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/dita/v1 ... tween-maps

but as far as I know the DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine does not yet support this feature.

Regards,
Radu

[ACH]

Radu,

Thank you for your reply - that mechanism would indeed be useful, shame it's not yet available in the DITA OT.

Until such time as it is implemented - do you know of any workarounds that are currently used to circumvent this limitation, i.e. what do other DITA users do when they need to refer to another related publication? E.g. using keys?

Thanks,

ACH

[Radu]

Hi Alexander,

I would suggest that you register on the Yahoo Groups DITA Users List and ask there, there are lots of DITA professionals registered to it and they might give you various ideas about how they approached this on their side.

Regards,
Radu