Oxygen 20.1 Webhelp compatible with old DITA OT versions?

[Anonymous1]

Hello,

we are using Oxygen 20.1 with a custom framework and DITA OT 2.4.4. Because of our custom framework, the Oxygen plugins (in this case WebHelp Responsive) are still based on Oxygen 18.

Now I would like to update the WebHelp to the latest version to make use of the latest WebHelp features introduced in the last two Oxygen versions.

Does the latest WebHelp plug-in require a certain DITA OT version? Or should I be able to update the WebHelp plug-in in combination with DITA OT 2.4.4?

Thanks,
Benjamin

[Costin]

Hi B-E-N,

Basically, you should be able to use a custom DITA-OT, different by the one that a specific version of oXygen comes bundled with.

However, as also stated in the requirements section from the WebHelp Responsive User-Guide:

The Oxygen XML WebHelp Responsive plugin has only been tested with this specific version: (DITA-OT 2.5.4. It is possible that the plugin may work with other versions, but only this version is fully supported.

Even if it might work, we can not guarantee that all of your customizations will continue to work if you are using an older DITA-OT, as incompatibility issues might occur. In such cases, you should re-create the customizations from scratch on your own.

Also, as the publishing templates format has changed lately, if you have publishing templates that you created in an older version of oXygen and want to use them with newer version (20.0 or later), you will need to convert the templates to the new format first. This is something that can be easily attained in just a few simple steps.

You can find the steps that you should follow to convert your older publishing templates in the How to Convert Old Templates to Version 20.0 and Newer section from the WebHelp Responsive User-Guide.

Regards,
Costin