Noob needs help w/xforming DocBook>DITA

[larrytheo]

I'm reasonably technically competent, but I've spent the last few months learning DocBook and OxygenXML and, boy, there's a lot to grasp. Now I need to migrate the documents I've been creating in DocBook 5 into DITA. I understand that no transformation is plug-and-play, and that as well as tweaking the transformation, I will need to break my documents into single-topic DITA documents.

However, my concern is getting over the first hurdle of simply transforming the basic document tagging, and I'm making slow, bumpy progress. Looking for a little help, or pointers to help. (I searched YouTube but didn't find much.)

What I've done so far:

- installed an updated version of the DITA OT by replacing the version in Oxygen's frameworks/dita folder. I changed the folder name to DITA-OT so it could be found without having to go change paths all over the place. That seems to have worked.

- Downloaded the docbook2dita.xsl plug-in, which is actually a whole folder full of files. I placed this folder in the frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins folder, which was my best guess for how to install it. Is that right?

- With one of the DocBook files I want to transform open in Oxygen, called up the Configure Transformation Scenarios dialog and created a new XML transformation with XSLT, which I associated with the file:/Applications/OxygenXML/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/dbdita/db2dita/docbook2dita.xsl.

- Specified in the Output section of the dialog that it should prompt me for file output, figuring that would at least tell me the darned script was running at all.

Then I tried running the transformation on ${currentfileURL}. When the file save dialog did, indeed, appear, I gave it a name and destination. The script ran fast and smooth and produced a lovely DITA document with no content in it at all.

I'm just taking my best guesses here, and that's not quite enough, it seems. Do I need to explicitly point it at the source file even though it is the open, active file in Oxygen? Is there something I didn't configure?

Any suggestions? I'm happy to post any other specifics that might be needed to help, or, as I said, take pointers to a tutorial or other appropriate resource.

This is a LOT to learn! But that's cool.

Thanks for the help.

[Radu]

Hi,

Please see some answers/comments below:

- installed an updated version of the DITA OT by replacing the version in Oxygen's frameworks/dita folder. I changed the folder name to DITA-OT so it could be found without having to go change paths all over the place. That seems to have worked.

You should never do this. In order to use another DITA OT installation with Oxygen, just copy that DITA OT folder to another location and refer to it from the Oxygen transformation scenarios:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-oxygen/ ... ta-ot.html

Oxygen's DITA OT comes bundled with special plugins developed by us like DITA to WebHelp or DITA to WebHelp Mobile and if you overwrite it you will lose this WebHelp publishing functionality.

- Downloaded the docbook2dita.xsl plug-in, which is actually a whole folder full of files. I placed this folder in the frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins folder, which was my best guess for how to install it. Is that right?
- With one of the DocBook files I want to transform open in Oxygen, called up the Configure Transformation Scenarios dialog and created a new XML transformation with XSLT, which I associated with the file:/Applications/OxygenXML/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/dbdita/db2dita/docbook2dita.xsl.

Right, actually this does not need to be installed in the DITA OT as an actual DITA OT plugin, it contains an XSLT stylesheet which can be applied directly over the Docbook content (as you already tried).
But the plugin is quite old and does not work with Docbook 4, you can find a suggestion to fix it here:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/forum/post16552.html#p16552

Regards,
Radu

[larrytheo]

Yeah, well I SAID I was a noob, and I PROVED it. However, I did not overwrite the existing folder, I just renamed it and moved it elsewhere, which is easily undone. The temptation to try and shortcut things is great when one is under pressure, but, of course, we must not yield so readily to temptation.

Thanks for the link. As soon as the page came up it looked familiar, and then I realized it was one of the first things I saw when I went looking for help, but I was so at the beginning of things that a lot of it just blew by me and I should have gone back after I started to learn a little more and reread it. Now it makes more sense.

So, I will proceed with all of the above suggestions and report back.

Thanks for your support and patience. It really is a lot of information to integrate.

Larry the O