Oxygen XML Forum

CONTEXT:
I'm a newbie, greatly enjoying oXygen and the productivity it gives for bringing DITA into our organisation (but an old hand at doco in general).

Our help is generated as HTML files deployed in two distinct sets, depending on whether the product in installed on premises or as SaaS. This means many topics have <ph> (and other) tags distinguished by "product" attributes, up the the level of some entire topics being for one product or the other, just as you expect.

Our engineers have (surprise!) limited time and attention for doco reviews. I generally publish a PDF from an entire map -- the help subset that impacts each engineer or group -- and they provide markup within the PDF. However, there is no way I can wring from them enough time to do reviews of TWO distinct PDFs.

THE QUESTION:
Is there a way to publish a 'review PDF' such that, if I leave both conditions on and the PDF contains both sets of text, they can be demarcated from one another in the PDF so that reviewers can easily see the distinctions between help versions and review them both efficiently? I have in mind something like the demarcation that displays in the Author view as I work on the documents.

I imagine I could learn a whole lot more and do something to customise output styles for the 'review PDF' output type; but I was rather hoping for something built-in to the product that I might have missed and could just 'turn on' in the zero minutes I have for this refinement.

Hi,

Oxygen uses the DITA Open Toolkit engine to publish DITA content to various output sources.
The profiling attributes are indeed used to filter out content at a certain stage during processing.
But they can also be used for flagging. For example if your DITAVAL filter file contains something like:
and in the DITA topic content you have constructs like:
then you can edit the PDF transformation scenario in Oxygen and in the Filters tab choose to use this specific DITAVAL.
When published to PDF, you should have that element rendered with yellow foreground.

That's one approach you should test, the other one would be to keep the entire reviewing process in XML. For example we have an Author Component project:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen_sdk.htm ... _component

which can be used to build a simple reviewer application which could be used by engineers instead of reviewing PDFs and then having someone merge comments from the PDF back to the DITA content. Of course, you would need to buy licenses for each author but they would cost less than a standalone application license.

Regards,
Radu

Thanks, Radu. Appreciate both the timeliness and depth of your response. "Building a simple reviewer application" sounds engineering-heavy and budget-process-heavy for the zero time budget available; and it wouldn't obviate the need for writer effort in expanding/integrating reviewer notes. I'll make time to poke around for my DITAVAL filter file and experiment with that option. Thanks again for the guidance.