Dita PDF/CSS: table on cover page

[abacus66]

Hi there,
Is it possible to place on the cover (front-page) after <booktitle> something like a revision table. Just that very case, a table with rows, columns and borders.

[xephon]

Hi, the sky is the limit. You can do this.

I've created a plugin a few years ago to automate this and automatically creates a table like this based on the metadata of the used topics in the map.

https://github.com/doctales/org.doctales.release-notes

[chrispitude]

Hi xephon,

That is a cool plugin! Very slick.

However, if Dr. ABacus is using the CSS-driven PDF transformation (PDF Chemistry), then I don't think the plugin would work.

We had a similar need for our release notes documents, to have a cover page along with some free-form content describing the applicable releases. We ended up (1) disabling the regular cover page, then (2) wrapping the whole map in an extra level of hierarchy:

Code: Select all

<topicref href="cover.dita">
  <topicref href="release_notes_intro.dita"/>
  <topicref href="release_notes_fixes.dita"/>
</topicref>

where the map/book title is no longer published, and the title of the "cover.dita" topic becomes the fake map/book title. You can use @outputclass and CSS to style the "cover.dita" content as needed.

Although now that I think about it, maybe we could have also just placed them linearly:

Code: Select all

<topicref href="cover.dita"/>
<topicref href="release_notes_intro.dita"/>
<topicref href="release_notes_fixes.dita"/>

and that might have worked too.

Maybe someone else will have a better idea for this!