Oxygen Author vs. Oxygen Publishing engine

[AnnetteSo]

Hello, I am already using Oxygen Author which has built-in transformations, and I've been experimenting with command line DITA-OT transforms.
I've downloaded a trial of Oxygen Publishing Engine. It's not clear to me, what does the Oxygen Publishing engine give me that I can't do already with Oxygen Author and Dita-OT transformations?

[Costin]

Hi Annette,

The Publishing engine contains a tailored DITA-OT distribution which already has the the PDF Chemistry and the WebHelp publishing plugins integrated.
As also the product description on the Publishing Engine section of our website reads:
It is a separate toolkit for easy integration with an automated process. This means that companies can use an integration server to run the transformations and publish the output or simply use command-line scripts to automate the publishing of PDF or WebHelp output.

Publishing PDF and WebHelp outputs can also be performed from Oxygen XML Author, but that could be done manually - one publishing at a time.
You could not automate the publishing from Author.

Regards,
Costin

[chrispitude]

Hi Annette,

When we evaluated Oxygen Publishing Engine, my management asked this same question.

It is precisely this fact - that Oxygen Publishing Engine replicates the publishing engine of Oxygen (but command-driven) - that makes it so useful.

For example, we have Oxygen publishing templates defined for our PDF Chemistry and WebHelp outputs:

Creating a Publishing Template to Customize WebHelp and PDF Output using CSS

When the writers want to interactively publish their content for testing and review, they use transformations defined in our Oxygen project that reference the publishing templates:

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To perform the final publishing in an automated way, we invoke the Oxygen Publishing Engine with these same publishing templates:

Code: Select all

dita \
  --input map.ditamap \
  --format pdf-css-html5 \
  -Dpdf.publishing.template.descriptor synopsys-pdf.opt
dita \
  --input map.ditamap \
  --format webhelp-responsive \
  -Dpdf.publishing.template.descriptor synopsys-webhelp.opt

This provides the following advantages:

• Automation - We can build scripts around Oxygen Publishing Engine to obtain content from revision control, summarize key transformation warning/error messages, check transformation success, build CI/CD pipelines, etc.
• Platform independence - Writers publish with Oxygen on their Windows 10 laptops, but we publish with Oxygen Publishing Engine in a linux environment.
• Consistency - We can be confident that the production-published content matches the interactively-published content.
• Maintenance - When we update a publishing template, both publishing environments reflect the change.

If you have any questions about how we use Oxygen Publishing Engine, feel free to ask!

[AnnetteSo]

Thank you very much for your replies. The ability to automate transforms is certainly useful.
I'm experimenting further currently with the Oxygen publishing templates. I'm trying the responsive webhelp template. Can I customize the toc base file name to something other than index.html? I've tried setting args.html5.toc, but it doesn't work on the webhelp output. I can't find an equivalent webhelp prop.

[cosmin_andrei]

Hello,
Unfortunately there is now way to customize the toc base file name to something other than index.html as this is the main page.