Oxygen DITA

[landernee]

I'm currently learning Oxygen/DITA in a digital technology class. For my final project, I'm recreating an operator's manual in DITA. In my employer's printed manuals, we utilize the footer of a page to indicate the manual part number and drawing revision level on the left of the footer, plus dates for content revisions on the right of the footer. When recreating this content in Oxygen/DITA, how can I attach drawing revision levels alongside the drawing image and revision dates within the content section? The final output from my DITA map will be a PDF.
Thanks for the help.

[julien_lacour]

Hello,

If you plan to use DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS you could start to create a custom CSS stylesheet and then check the following topics from our user guide:

• Page Margin Boxes: this topic detailed CSS page margin-boxes which are used to add content in header/footer.
• Page Headers and Footers: this topic explains how to customize PDF headers and footers, for example you can define a new string-set and display it in the bottom-left page margin-box (footer):

  Code: Select all

  *[class ~= "topic/topic"][is-part] > *[class ~= "topic/title"] {
    string-set: partnumber counter(part, upper-roman),
                parttitle " | " counter(part, upper-roman) " - " content(), 
                parttitle-no-prefix " " counter(part, upper-roman) " - " content(), 
                chaptertitle "", 
                chaptertitle-no-prefix ""; /* Avoid propagating a past chapter title on a new part */
  }
  
  @page {
    @bottom-left {
      content: string(partnumber);
    }
  }
  

  Notes:
  • Always keep the default string-sets as this property is not additive (like the majority of CSS properties - defining a new value will override the previous ones).
  • This example works for shallow numnbering (default), if you are using deep numbering the default rule can be copied from [OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR]\frameworks\dita\DITA-OT\plugins\com.oxygenxml.pdf.css\css\print\p-numbering-deep.css
• How to Show Metadata in the Header or Footer: this topic explains how to reuse metadata from the original DITA source files in the PDF, this can be useful for revision or dates.
  You can also check the Processing Metadata for Bookmaps topic to understand how to use the oxy_xpath() function in order to fetch metadata, if the string-sets are not enough.

FYI you can debug the CSS at any time to see all the rules applied on an element, you can also use the merged.html file to debug the XPath expressions.

Regards,
Julien