What's New in Oxygen XML Author 20.1
June 15, 2018
Related version: 20.0
Version 20.1 of the Oxygen XML Author includes numerous productivity improvements, DITA publishing was updated to make the WebHelp output compliant with the Section 508 accessibility standard, making it accessible for people with disabilities, and publishing DITA maps to PDF using CSS styles can be applied on HTML5 as intermediate format, thus reusing the HTML5 WebHelp publishing CSS styles. As usual, this version also contains numerous new add-ons, API, and component updates.
To enable simple and streamlined collaboration, our new product called Oxygen Content Fusion is now available. It can be used from Oxygen XML Author to share XML content with reviewers and contributors, providing them access to a snapshot of your content from any device and without any installation. You can then easily merge their changes back into your original content.
There are changes in:
Collaboration
Add-On for the New Content Fusion Collaboration Platform
A free add-on is now available that connects Oxygen XML
Editor/Author to an Oxygen Content
Fusion server (either your own Enterprise/On-Premise or our
Public/Hosted server). Once installed, a task manager view is available
in Oxygen XML Editor/Author where you can create review tasks that will
include documents to be uploaded for review. You can share a URL to such a task with your
collaborators, who will be able to review or contribute to that content in their browser.
Finally, you can easily integrate the remote changes back into the original files in
Oxygen XML
Editor/Author.
You can get started by evaluating Oxygen Content Fusion free for 60 days!
DITA Authoring
Improved DITA Reusable Components View
The Components tab now includes an option to switch to a
Compact mode, thus presenting more components in the visible area. The
search for reusable components was optimized to increase its speed.
More Validate and Check for Completeness Checks
Various improvements and fixes were added to the DITA map validate and check
for completeness functionality. For example, it now reports if you have topic references
inside a map reference (such topics will be ignored by DITA-OT during
publishing).
Resolve References
A new action called Replace All References with Content is
available when editing DITA documents. It replaces all referenced fragments (keyrefs,
conrefs, or conkeyrefs) in the current document with the actual referenced
content.
Extract Topic References into a New DITA Map
An Extract to New DITA Map refactoring action was added in the
DITA Maps Manager, available from the contextual menu. It creates a new DITA map, inserts
the selected topic references inside the new map and the selected topic references from
the initial map are replaced with a reference to the newly created map.
Convert Nested Topics to New Topics
A Convert nested topics to new topics refactoring action was
added in the DITA Maps Manager, available from the contextual menu. It detects the inner
topics in a DITA topic and extracts them as new topic files, removes them from the topic,
and adds topic references to the newly created topics, as children of the corresponding
topic, in the map.
Preview and Convert Markdown to DITA Using Lightweight DITA Standards
The DITA preview of the Markdown editor is synchronized with the DITA Open
Toolkit used for publishing. For example, you can add DITA-OT 3.x support by installing
our special add-on
and then select it as the default publishing engine in the DITA
preferences page. Afterwards, if a DITA Map opened in the DITA Maps Manager contains a
topic reference to a Markdown file, you can change the value of its
format attribute to mdita. Then, when you open that
document in Oxygen, the DITA Preview pane will show the Markdown content obtained by
converting it according to the Lightweight DITA
MDITA encoding rules. Converting the Markdown file to DITA will apply the same conversion
rules.
Alternate Style for Hiding Prolog Section
The Styles drop-down menu now includes an alternate style
labeled + Hide Prolog that can be selected to hide the DITA prolog
element when rendering documents in Author mode.
DITA CSS-based PDF Publishing
PDF Output based on HTML5 and CSS
The new DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS transformation
scenario can be used to convert DITA maps to PDF. This scenario uses an HTML5 intermediate
format similar to the one generated for the WebHelp transformation. It makes it possible
to reuse the CSS styles between the two
transformations.
Publishing Templates for PDF Transformations
You have the ability to create publishing templates and to use them in the
DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS transformation scenario. The
same publishing template package (CSS files, media resources, XSLT extensions) can now
contain both PDF and WebHelp Responsive customizations allowing you to easily bundle and
share both customizations as a single publishing template. You can find more details in
the technical
documentation.
DITA to Responsive WebHelp
Accessibility Support
Oxygen XML WebHelp Responsive is compliant with the Section 508 accessibility standard, making the output accessible for people with
disabilities. All the WebHelp Responsive components (such as the menu or table of
contents) are designed to comply with the accessibility rules. The Oxygen user's manual
contains some writing guidelines to help with creating accessible documentation.
HTML5
WebHelp now uses XSLT stylesheets from the DITA-OT HTML5 plugin to generate
output instead of the XHTML plugin.
WebHelp Responsive Macros
WebHelp Responsive now supports macros that allow you to insert variable text
inside the output pages. More specifically, what you can add includes: localized content,
system properties, environment variables, timestamps, and XPath expressions executed over
the current DITA map or topic.
Contribute JavaScript AMD Modules in the Output
WebHelp Responsive now provides the ability to contribute custom JavaScript
Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) resources in the output. This can be achieved by
referencing it in the Publishing Template descriptor file. By using this
approach, when you want to customize the output you are no longer required to alter
WebHelp's core JavaScript libraries.
Add-ons
To offer the benefit of more rapid release cycles, some new functionality was
added using the Add-ons support.
Git Plugin Fixes and Performance Improvements
The add-on that adds support to work with a Git repository from within the
application was updated to contain various performance optimizations, faster credential
detection, bug fixes, and the ability to check out a specific branch when cloning a
repository. For more information, see https://github.com/oxygenxml/oxygen-git-plugin.
Updated DITA OT 3.x Add-on to DITA OT 3.1
The add-on that adds support to publish DITA content using DITA OT 3.x was
updated to use DITA Open Toolkit version 3.1 and the latest Oxygen WebHelp Responsive
plugins. For more information, see https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-ot-3x-plugin.
Embed Images as Base64-encoded Inline Data
A new add-on is available that contributes a contextual menu action to embed
all images referenced in a DITA, DocBook, or XHTML document as Base64-encoded inline data.
It's helpful if you want to transfer a document with image references over media designed
to deal with textual data and you want to ensure the data remains intact, or if you do not
want any external dependencies for your document but you still want to use images. For
more information, see https://github.com/oxygenxml/oxygen-embed-images.
Other
Allow Reusing Answer to Ask Editor Variables in Multiple Places
The new ${answer(@question_id)} editor variable can now be
used in conjunction with the ${ask()} editor variable to ask the end
users a question and afterwards use the provided answer in multiple places in new file
templates, code templates, or various other XML fragments.
Execute Multiple Actions Sequentially in the Button Group Form Control
The Button Group form control now accepts the
oxy_compount_action function within an oxy_action_list
function, making it possible to execute multiple actions sequentially.
API
New cellFragment Argument for InsertTableOperation in DocBook
The ro.sync.ecss.extensions.docbook.table.InsertTableOperation API has a new
argument, cellFragment, and its value will be inserted in every cell of
the table in DocBook.
Component Updates
Saxon 9.8.0.12
Updated the built-in Saxon engine to version 9.8.0.12.
Eclipse 4.8 Photon
The Oxygen Eclipse plugin was updated to officially support the latest
Eclipse version 4.8.
Calabash 1.1.21
Updated the Calabash engine to version 1.1.21.