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Dita PDF/CSS: table on cover page
Posted: Thu May 19, 2022 7:38 pm
by abacus66
Hi there,
Is it possible to place on the cover (front-page) after <booktitle> something like a revision table. Just that very case, a table with rows, columns and borders.
Re: Dita PDF/CSS: table on cover page
Posted: Fri May 20, 2022 7:41 am
by xephon
Hi, the sky is the limit. You can do this.
I've created a plugin a few years ago to automate this and automatically creates a table like this based on the metadata of the used topics in the map.
https://github.com/doctales/org.doctales.release-notes
Re: Dita PDF/CSS: table on cover page
Posted: Fri May 20, 2022 2:05 pm
by chrispitude
Hi xephon,
That is a cool plugin! Very slick.
However, if Dr. ABacus is using the CSS-driven PDF transformation (PDF Chemistry), then I don't think the plugin would work.
We had a similar need for our release notes documents, to have a cover page along with some free-form content describing the applicable releases. We ended up (1) disabling the regular cover page, then (2) wrapping the whole map in an extra level of hierarchy:
Code: Select all
<topicref href="cover.dita">
<topicref href="release_notes_intro.dita"/>
<topicref href="release_notes_fixes.dita"/>
</topicref>
where the map/book title is no longer published, and the title of the "cover.dita" topic becomes the fake map/book title. You can use @outputclass and CSS to style the "cover.dita" content as needed.
Although now that I think about it, maybe we could have also just placed them linearly:
Code: Select all
<topicref href="cover.dita"/>
<topicref href="release_notes_intro.dita"/>
<topicref href="release_notes_fixes.dita"/>
and that might have worked too.
Maybe someone else will have a better idea for this!