Oxygen XML Forum

Hi,

I'm using Oxygen 16.0 to output HTML WebHelp from DITA.

I'd like the Figure and Table cross-reference links in the text of the Help topics to say "Figure #" or "Table #" rather than repeat the actual title of the figure or the table. Is there a way to do that?

For example, I'd like "Figure 3 shows the user interface." rather than "User interface shows the user interface." We're moving from FrameMaker/Eclipse Help to Oxygen/WebHelp and all our content is written to assume figure and table cross-references use "Figure #" or "Table #", not the actual text of the figure and table titles.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Hi,

Sorry, this can't be done in the DITA WebHElp transformation or in the DITA XHTML transformation, because these transformations do not create a continuous sequence with all the content so that the position of each figure can be known in the overall sequence (like: the first figure/table in the complete sequence with all figures/tables, the second figure/table in the complete sequence, etc). Each DITA XML topic file is processed individually so the position of a figure can be known only relative to the start of that topic, not relative to the start of the DITA map.

sorin wrote:Each DITA XML topic file is processed individually so the position of a figure can be known only relative to the start of that topic, not relative to the start of the DITA map.

Actually, that's all I need. I just want cross-references to Figures and Tables to be inserted and numbered within the context of individual DITA topics. So, for example:

DITA topic 1

... Figure 1 shows...
... Figure 2 shows ...

DITA topic 2

... Figure 1 shows ...
... Figure 2 shows ...

Being able to insert cross-references that use "Figure #" and "Table #", instead of the actual text of the figure and table titles, would save us a lot of re-work. If we can't do that, one option would be to manually type in "Figure #" and "Table #" cross-references, which is a bad workaround, because then the cross-references wouldn't dynamically update. Or we'd have to rewrite numerous sentences in our Help system to use the figure and table titles instead of "Figure #" or "Table #".

I guess another option is to go back to outputting Eclipse Help, which does allow "Figure #" and "Table #" to be used instead of the title text. But there are features of WebHelp that we like, so we're hoping to move away from Eclipse Help.

I think it could be done but you need to customize the stylesheets of DITA-OT that create the XHTML pages. You can start from the stylesheet OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\frameworks\dita\DITA-OT\plugins\org.dita.xhtml\xsl\dita2xhtml.xsl. This file is used in the WebHelp transformation so if you modify the figure and table references in this stylesheet the result will be visible in the WebHelp pages.

Thanks Sorin,

I thought it might involve modifying some of the XSL. You've pointed me in the right direction. Now I just have to learn something about XSLT.