[oXygen-user] Managing revisions

[Oxygen XML Editor Support (Radu Coravu)]

Hi Yves,

Coming back to your request:

>   Track changes automatically, i.e. without having to change the @rev attribute manually

Honestly I don't think that's a good idea.
Looking at how many changes our technical documentation writer does 
between releases, how many spell check errors he fixes, how much content 
he reuses, how much phrasing of existing paragraphs he changes, some of 
the changes the technical writer does should not appear as revisions 
because they are small bug fixes in the existing DITA content.
So having the application mark as revisions every DITA element in which 
changes have been done will generate in the end a very large list of 
revisions, a list which will be overwhelming to read by anyone.
Also if I change a single character in a paragraph (a spell check) that 
entire paragraph which may span half a page will be marked as a revision.

To whom is this revision list destined? Is it for the end user (like a 
list of new features) or is it for an internal reviewer?
If the list is for the end user maybe it should be manually created 
because the end user does not need to know that a certain paragraph was 
re-written to improve its readability.
If the list is for an internal reviewer, maybe the tech writers should 
use change tracking instead because change tracking and comments already 
can be made to appear in the published output.

The problem with adding new functionality to Oxygen is making sure that 
functionality covers as many similar use cases as possible. If I only 
cover a company's use case but my support for revisions is not generic 
enough to cover the use cases of other companies, then it's not worth 
implementing it.
So ideally I would need to be in direct contact with two or more 
companies requiring this and understand if we can build a solution which 
would satisfy lots of various company-specific needs.
Because in the end, if the revision-related improvements are kind of 
company-specific it's not worth in investing resources to add the 
improvements in Oxygen.
In a way this is why Oxygen has API, this is why we have support for 
plugins, for custom validation and why the publishing can be customized, 
in order to cover company specific requirements with company specific 
customizations made by a company which could have a separate contract 
with that company based on providing this service.

Regards,
Radu

Radu Coravu
<oXygen/> XML Editor
http://www.oxygenxml.com

On 7/8/2019 2:52 PM, Yves Barbion wrote:
> Thank you for your reply, Radu.
>
> So I understand that some custom development work would need to be done,
> using the various technologies (oXygen plugin, CSS, XSLT...). We are
> getting requests like these quite regularly from our oXygen customers,
> so I think it would be very nice to have this as a standard feature in
> one of the next releases of oXygen XML Author/Editor.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Yves
>
>
>
> On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 09:38, Oxygen XML Editor Support (Radu Coravu)
> <support at oxygenxml.com <mailto:support at oxygenxml.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Yves,
>
>     I see no one else answered this on the Oxygen Users List.
>
>     I'm linking to the similar thread you started on the DITA Users List:
>
>     https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dita-users/conversations/topics/44837
>
>     My answers for your questions would be:
>
>     >     Track changes automatically, i.e. without having to change the
>     @rev attribute manually
>
>     By "track changes" you mean automatically setting the @rev attribute on
>     modified elements. And this can be done with a custom Oxygen plugin.
>
>     >     Indicate the changed paragraphs with change bars in the PDF
>     (using Miramo)
>
>     Using our DITA + CSS = PDF plugin this could quite easily be done, add
>     some CSS selectors which add borders for elements containing the @rev
>     attribute.
>
>     >     Generate a list of revisions
>
>     You would need some kind of custom XSLT processing going through all
>     topics and creating maybe a DITA topic containing links to all changed
>     topics.
>
>     Regards,
>     Radu
>
>     Radu Coravu
>     <oXygen/> XML Editor
>     http://www.oxygenxml.com
>
>     On 7/4/2019 10:57 AM, Yves Barbion wrote:
>     > Hi group
>     >
>     > I'm using oXygen XML Editor version 21 to author DITA-structured
>     content
>     > and I was wondering how to manage revisions. This is what I'd like
>     to do:
>     >
>     >   * Track changes automatically, i.e. without having to change the
>     @rev
>     >     attribute manually
>     >   * Indicate the changed paragraphs with change bars in the PDF (using
>     >     Miramo)
>     >   * Generate a list of revisions
>     >
>     > I'm not using a CCMS or a version management system at this moment.
>     >
>     > Any ideas?
>     >
>     > Thanks
>     >
>     > Yves
>     >
>     >
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