Track changes in Dita Map PDF

[Boreas]

Hello,
I was wondering if it was possible to create a clean PDF of the Dita Map, with all topics, and tracked changes included to the topics. We are using the PDF for review purposes and we need the entire document to be sent, with changes clearly identified.
I tried opening the dita map in the author view, and printing as a pdf. The tracked changes in Oxygen are printed out, but the PDF includes the Dita map markups. Not clean. For our revisors it can be a problem.
If I try generating the PDF with a scenario, I can only display the changes,(not the deletion), but they don't stand out.
Is it a parameter I missed? Our perhaps you have another solution (and no, having revisors working in the source files is not an option .

Thanks

[Radu]

Hi Carole,

Indeed the usual DITA to PDF publishing which is done with the DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine does not handle Oxygen change tracking in any special way because they are application-specific and the publishing engine does not know their format.

And indeed one option is to open the DITA Map in the DITA Maps Manager view, choose to "Open Map in Editor with Resolved Topics" and then use Oxygen's File->Print facility to print to a PDF printer driver.
I think you can work at the way the expanded map looks like when viewed in the Author editing mode by adding some more CSS selectors to the CSS stylesheets which controls rendering the map.

For example you can try to open this CSS file:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\frameworks\dita\css_classed\map.css

and add to the end of it these CSS selectors:

Code: Select all

*|reference:before {

  content: "" !important;  

}

*|reference{

    -oxy-editable:false !important;

    background-color: transparent !important;

    margin:0px !important;

    padding: 0px !important;

}

*[class~="map/topicref"]{

    -oxy-foldable:false;

    margin-left:0em;

    margin-top:0em;

    margin-bottom:0em;

}

*[class~="map/topicref"]:before{

    display:inline;

    content: "" !important;

    background-color:inherit;

}

then open the map with resolved topics in the Author visual editing mode, that should be enough to remove all the indentation added by the topicrefs and also remove the topicref attribute details.

Instead of modifying directly one or our CSSs you can also create a new CSS with those rules and use it as an alternative CSS for viewing DITA Maps with expanded topics in the Author editing mode.

Regards,
Radu

[Boreas]

Hello,
thanks it works fine.
I was wondering, if I create a new css file to keep intact Oxygen's original file, in wich file should I make the file name change to point to my new CSS?
I am sorry, it is perhaps a basic question, but I always struggle to make the links between all files.

Regards

[Radu]

Hi Carole,

Actually, after your initial post (which is a very good use case) I created such a CSS stylesheet and Oxygen 16.1 will come bundled with one by default.
Here's what I did:

I created a new CSS called map_print_resolved_topics.css in the folder:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\frameworks\dita\css_classed\

with the content:

Code: Select all

@import "dita.css";

/*Useful when opening a map with resolved topics and then printing it to PDF with change tracking, 

removes extra indents and static texts*/

*|reference:before {

  content: "" !important;  

}

*|reference{

    -oxy-editable:false !important;

    background-color: transparent !important;

    margin:0px !important;

    padding: 0px !important;

}

*[class~="map/topicref"]{

    margin-left:0em;

    margin-top:0em;

    margin-bottom:0em;

}

*[class~="map/topicref"]:before{

    display:inline;

    content: "" !important;

    background-color:inherit;

}



*{

    -oxy-foldable:false !important;

}



*[class~="topic/colspec"] {

    display: none !important;    

}



*[class~="topic/tgroup"]:before {

    display: none !important;    

}



*{

    -oxy-display-tags:none !important;

}

Then in the Oxygen Preferences->Document Type Association page I edited the DITA Map document type and in the Author->CSS tab I added a reference to the new CSS, gave it a title (for example Map With Resolved Topics - Print ready) and specified it as being Alternate.

After this, when you open a DITA Map with resolved topic in the Author visual editing mode, there is a toolbar button called Styles which allows you to switch between various alternate CSSs, among which you will find your alternate CSS and you can switch to it. The down side is that if the content is large you may need to wait a while for the switch to take place.

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

Are there any plans to provide a PDF transformation which also includes the track changes? This is a frequently asked for requirement from our customers.

Kind regards,
Frank

[Radu]

Hi Frank,

It's quite difficult to do this, change tracking markers added by Oxygen are very flexible in nature and I'm not sure that if we ever find the time to do this we'll find the proper XSL-FO constructs to represent them.

You can find a longer answer here:

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

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

Thanks for your quick reply and the pointer to the other thread. That post is really helpful.

Kind regards,
Frank

[Radu]

Hi,

Starting with Oxygen 18.1 which we released a couple of weeks ago, Oxygen change tracking information will also be visible in the WebHelp and classic PDF outputs by enabling the show.changes.and.comments parameter.

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Thanks for the follow-up, Radu! This is a great feature which a lot of customers request.

Kind regards,
Frank

[Fredrik_Lönn]

Being able to view the changes in pdf-output would be very helpful to me as well. Does the show.changes.and.comments functionality exist even if I am using a DITA-OT external to the installation?

Regardless - do I simply add the above parameter and set its value to "yes" (without citation marks)?

Best Regards,
Fredrik

[Radu]

Hi Fredrik,

If you have an external DITA OT you need to install in it this free DITA OT plugin we developed:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-classic-pdf-review

If you are using Oxygen 18.1 and you are using Oxygen's bundled DITA OTs (Oxygen comes bundled with both DITA OT 1.8 and 2.x) you can just set the parameter with value "yes" (without citation marks) in the "Parameters" list.

Regards,
Radu

[Fredrik_Lönn]

Hi Radu,

Thank's for the advice. It works as expected when I use Oxygen's bundled Dita-OT.

I also get it to work using my external DITA OT installation. First I had an issue when using the parameter name as given in the readme-file of the plugin ("show.oxygen.changes.and.comments"), but when changing to the same name as used in Oxygen 18.1 ("show.changes.and.comments") it worked.

I am however not able to get this working with my own plugin that is an extension of the pdf2 plugin. Might I be overriding some part that is needed for this to work? What should I look for?

Best Regards,
Fredrik

[Radu]

Hi Frederik,

I modified the readme from the GitHub plugin to properly specify the name of that particular parameter so thanks for the feedback.
About this:

I am however not able to get this working with my own plugin that is an extension of the pdf2 plugin. Might I be overriding some part that is needed for this to work? What should I look for?

You are not the only one having the problem with the plugin not working with their pdf2 plugin. Ideally you would look a little bit at our plugin, understand how it works, then add some ANT echos and xsl:messages in the XSLT content to see if they get called.
If you are willing to send us your PDF2 customization plugin (support@oxygenxml.com) I could try to find some time to look into it.

Regards,
Radu

[Fredrik_Lönn]

Hi,

I think that for review purposes, using the standard plugin is an acceptable temporary solution. It buys me some time to take a look at your plugin and try to figure out how it works. I suspect that's a better solution for me in the long run, although your offer to review my plugin is tempting. I don't have an issue with sharing it and might get back to you if I don't manage on my own.

Thank's for the quick response!

Best Regards,
Fredrik

[Radu]

Hi Fredrik,

By the way, if you find a situation in which the PDF output is not produced because of this specific parameter, please add an issue to the project.
I just updated the GitHub project's XSLTs with the latest fixes we made based on various reported situation.

Regards,
Radu

[yde]

Hi,

Starting with Oxygen 18.1 which we released a couple of weeks ago, Oxygen change tracking information will also be visible in the WebHelp and classic PDF outputs by enabling the show.changes.and.comments parameter.

Regards,
Radu

Hi Radu,
I use oXygen 18.1.
I see the show.changes.and.comments parameter for PDF output, but not for webhelp. Was this added / is it going to be added in a later version of oXygen?
Thanks,

[Radu]

Hi,

For WebHelp the parameter seems to be called webhelp.show.changes.and.comments.

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

We want to modify the way review changes are displayed in the PDF output (change bars instead of foot notes). However, we haven't figured out the best way to do this. Is there any extension point? Or can/shall we just override the XSLT in the com.oxygenxml.pdf.review plugin?

If we could make this configurable, any modifications could also be applied to https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-classic-pdf-review so they would be available for everyone.

Best regards,
Frank

[Radu]

Hi Frank,

You can probably start by forking our plugin and make changes on your side. If at some point you want to contribute the changes back, we can consider this, otherwise you can have your own GitHub project forked from ours and you can change the plugin ID so it's another plugin.

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

Many thanks for your quick reply. We have forked the repo and will probably create our own plugin as a first step. If anything useful comes out of it we will contribute back to the community

Best regards,
Frank

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

We took the plugin the DITA-OT_1.8_2.x_compatible branch and integrated it into Oxygen 20.1. However, we got an error message and noticed that the filereview-pis-to-elements-pdf-classic.xsl was missing in that branch. We copied it over from the master branch at the plugin now works as expected.

Best regards,
Frank

[Radu]

Hi Frank,

Sorry about that, I just pushed some more recent changes to that branch, now the plugin contains exactly the same contents as what was included in Oxygen 20.1:
https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-class ... compatible

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

Many thanks for the update. We have already fixed some additional minor issues ourselves but knowing that the 1.8.x/2.x branch is now up-to-date is a big help!

Best regards,
Frank

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

We also want to show track changes from map-level content in the PDF, namely changes to the following attributes and elements:

• @title
• <title>
• <searchtitle>
• <data>

As far as I can see from my analysis, the <oxy: ...> elements get lost at different stages in the processing of the review PIs. However, I haven't figured out how to keep them so that the track changes show in the rendered PDF. Any pointers welcome.

Best regards,
Frank

[Radu]

Hi Frank,

I made with track changes a change to the main map's <title> element. It seemed to be preserved in the PDF output.
For "searchtitle", "data", they are more metadata elements, they do not even appear by default in the PDF output. If you have custom XSLT which uses and displays them somehow for the PDF output, maybe your custom XSLT needs to preserve the original processing instructions.

Regards,
Radu

[Frank Ralf]

Hi Radu,

Thanks for testing. Yes, we have a customized PDF plugin that renders some of the metadata from the map as visible content, for example, keywords and abstract. I will have a look if (and where) the processing instructions get lost.

Kind regards,
Frank