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Prefixes for DITA elements

Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2019 12:57 am
by mjlorenzi
Hello,

Hope to be a future Oxygen user, but until then I am here to ask some questions.
Currently I am using Adobe FrameMaker to author and publish DITA content.
The authoring is not too bad, but the publishing is arduously painful.

FrameMakers uses a combination of EDD files and FrameMaker templates (FM) to render the output.
By default some DITA elements will publish a prefix in the PDF output. For example, using the context element in a task will insert the word "Context:" in the output. Same thing for Result, StepResult, etc. These prefixes are controlled by the FrameMaker EDD files.

Other prefixes are controlled by the template file and are part of a paragraph style.

Where to find out where to control these prefixes is part of the challenge with FrameMaker. A lot of this functionality probably predates FrameMaker's integegration of DITA and quite honestely I find it unnecessary.

So, to my question, can one insert/remove/edit these prefixes in Oxygen XML? Where would this be done? Would this be handled by a CSS file or additional transformation file? I don't dismiss this functionality outright, but it would be good to know where and how this integration is handled.

Thank you.

Re: Prefixes for DITA elements

Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2019 8:05 am
by Radu
Hi,

Thank you for contacting us.
I will assume you are using the latest Oxygen version, Oxygen 21.1.
Oxygen uses for DITA publishing the DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine which is open source and can also be downloaded and used separately.
On top of the publishing engine Oxygen has created its own two main publishing plugins:

1) A plugin for building WebHelp Responsive output from DITA (and the Oxygen users manual which is written in DITA and published to our web site is an example of this https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/21.1/ug-editor/)

2) The second output format is called DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS which can produce PDF using CSS to style the output. We have an entire chapter in our user's manual giving examples of how CSS can be used to customize various aspects of the PDF: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... n_css.html.

In both of these output formats those labels you mentioned are not shown by default. But there is a parameter called "args.gen.task.lbl" which can be set to "YES" to start showing the different task labels in the entire PDF.

Regards,
Radu

Re: Prefixes for DITA elements

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2019 1:55 am
by mjlorenzi
Hello Radu,

Thanks for the reply. This is good information. Could you briefly speak to these publishing plugins. Do they come as part of Oxygen XML Author? Can one still do create a WebHelp output out-of-the-box, or does one need the Oxygen XML WebHelp 21.1 plugin for this?

Re: Prefixes for DITA elements

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2019 7:50 am
by Radu
Hi,

The publishing engine for an Oxygen installation is located in this folder:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\frameworks\dita\DITA-OT3.x

some of the plugins in its "plugins" folder are common plugins which come with the default DITA OT distribution while some of them (the one prefixed with the "com.oxygenxml" folder names) are created by us. Some of those com.oxygenxml plugins are marked as open source (they have license files in the folders) while some of them are commercial (like the "com.oxygenxml.webhelp.responsive" plugin).
If you use Oxygen XML Author (or Editor), you can publish from inside Oxygen freely to any output format, including WebHelp Responsive and PDF based on CSS.
But if you want to publish without human intervention, for example set up an integration server to publish your DITA content to WebHelp Responsive for example on that particular server you will need to set up a special license:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_webhelp/b ... bhelp.html

Regards,
Radu