how to get 'mixed' landscape and portrait pages from a DITA map

[nlpharrison]

Hi,

I'm having trouble generating a mixed portrait/landscape document directly from XMetaL.  If a &topic;, &section;, &fig;, &table; or &title; has an @outputclass="landscape", the page the relevant element is on should be rotated and use a landscape page-master, but when I generate the output directly from XMetaL, my document doesn't display those elements at all - the output document is simply missing the content completely.  Such items show up in the toc/lot/lof, but with a page number of '0'.

I don't understand it, since when I use the same DITA source and the same stylesheet from within an Astoria CMS, the pages are rendered correctly.  So I don't see how it could be either the source or the stylesheet, but I can't figure out what else it might be.  I need to be able to test stylesheets outside of the CMS, but at this rate, I don't seem to be able to.

Has anyone ever had this problem?  Does XMetaL have any internal parameters that might be causing it?

Thanks,
Nancy

[Derek Read]

I don't see any checks for outputclass="landscape" (or any other similar values) in the default DITA OT we include with XMetaL Author Enterprise 6.0 (that would be the same for earlier versions too then).

So, I assume Astoria must have some additional logic in their server-side copy of the DITA OT that the standard DITA OT we install (which is version 1.4.2.1 with XMetaL Author Enterprise 6.0) does not have.

Keep in mind that you might also be running a different DITA OT transtype in both instances.

XMetaL "deliverable"                  = DITA OT transtype
---------------------------------------------------------
"PDF via FO with default processing"  = pdf
"Book via RenderX"                    = pdf2
"XMetaL Enhanced PDF via RenderX XEP" = pdf3

Also, the DITA OT obtained from SourceForge does not include our "pdf3" transtype.
Astoria can tell you which one of these (or other) that they are running on their server.

[nlpharrison]

Hi Derek,

The check for outputclass="landscape" is implemented by the custom stylesheet [my client's stylesheet] that I'm using, which is a customization of [and directly imports] the DITA-OT dita2fo-shell.xsl stylesheet.  When it sees that attribute value, it calls its customized version of the landscape page-master template. 

The thing is, I'm using the same stylesheet inside and outside of Astoria - I created a customized version of the DITA-OT folder to use with my local XMetaL when I working with this client's content - and the same source files.  Other than the landscape issues, the stylesheet seems to have the same effect on the source files in terms of formatting and page-, topic-, section-, figure- and table-numbering, whether I invoke it from within XMetaL or from within Astoria.  My client's writers are all using XMetaL to author in, so they've set up their system to coordinate as well as possible.

I'm also discussing this with their Astoria expert, but I just wondered if anyone had ever run into this before.

Thanks,
Nancy

[Derek Read]

This is new to me. Haven't heard of any other clients trying to get mixed page sizes or orientations in the same document. I guess that means that others have tried it without issue, or they aren't trying (or they got help elsewhere).

If you think you have configured things identically in both systems (ie: just this one file is different) then there must be a difference in the starting framework between what Astoria is running and what we are running. I suppose copying both to the same machine and then doing a DIFF on the relevent parts would be the best strategy to start with.