Get PDF output to include preview titles and short description at chapter top

[jepry]

Using this basic structure:

<bookmap>
     <part>
          <chapter>
               <topic> <title> Topic Name 1</title>
                           <short description> blah blah blah one  </short description> </topic>

               <topic> <title>Topic Name 2</title>
                           <short description> blah blah blah two  </short description></topic>

               <topic> <title>Topic Name 3</title>
                           <short description> blah blah blah three  </short description></topic>

             

My Webhelp output for the <chapter> level above includes the short description for each topic as preview and a link to the topic title, as in:

Name of the chapter
Short description for the chapter

Topic Title 1
blah blah blah one   (short description for topic 1)

Topic Title 2
blau blah blah two

Topic Title 3
blah blah blah three

However my PDF output (using Xmetal Enhanced PDF via Render X XEP) doesn't include the preview short descriptions and links to title topics at the chapter level. One level higher, at <part>, it does include the chapter titles as links, but no short descriptions.

Does anyone know how to modify the PDF output to pick up the titles and short descriptions of the topics contained within a chapter and put them at the top of the chapter, the same way the HTML Webhelp output does?

I realize they're very different types of output but I imagine this is possible, however so far I'm having no luck so far finding the right .xsl files to modify to get this result.

Thanks,


XMetal 6.0
Xmetal Enhanced PDF via Render X XEP

[jepry]

For anyone interested, I stumbled upon something in the DITA OT that controls this, buried in the file:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\SoftQuad\XMetaL Shared\DITA_OT\demo\xmfo\Customization\fo\xsl\xm_commons_mod.xsl

Text-edit that file and uncomment the line:
   
                <!--xsl:call-template name="createMiniToc"/-->
               
     (change to)

                  <xsl:call-template name="createMiniToc"/>

This line appears a number of times in this file, but only the one instance was commented out (in my file it's line 165).

 I also commented out the two following lines, haven't tested if that was necessary, but it didn't hurt anything, so now they appear like this:

                    <!--xsl:message>[XM] no miniTOC in chapter</xsl:message-->
                    <!--xsl:comment>[XM] no miniTOC in chapter</xsl:comment-->


The result is that now at the top of each Chapter in the PDF I have links to the topics the chapter contains. It didn't include short descriptions but that's good enough.

So it's a "mini-toc" feature that's just turned off for PDFs in this installation of the DITA OT by default I guess, those links do appear in any HTML output I tried.