How to stop XMAU appending formatting info to rootnode_ditabase.css?

[ghkrause]

After opening a dita topic with rootnode <q-task> the q-task_ditabase.css file is extended to hold formatting info for @audience, @platform and @product. How can I stop XMetaL Author to do this?

I moved all this attribute based formatting into a file ditabase-final.css which I already included as you see below:

@import url(..\shared\ditabase-base.css);
@import url(..\ditabase\ditabase-base-override.css);
@import url(..\shared\ditabase-derived.css);
@import url(..\ditabase\ditabase-derived-override.css);
@import url(q-concept_ditabase-specialized.css);
@import url(..\shared\ditabase-final.css);[audience] { background-color: #F0F8FF;  }
[class~="topic/image"][audience]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/image"][audience]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[class~="topic/xref"][audience]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/xref"][audience]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[class~="topic/object"][audience]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/object"][audience]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[platform] { background-color: #F0F8FF;  }
[class~="topic/image"][platform]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/image"][platform]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[class~="topic/xref"][platform]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/xref"][platform]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[class~="topic/object"][platform]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/object"][platform]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[product] { background-color: #F0F8FF;  }
[class~="topic/image"][product]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/image"][product]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[class~="topic/xref"][product]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/xref"][product]:after {  content: " ]"; }
[class~="topic/object"][product]:before {  content: "[ "; }
[class~="topic/object"][product]:after {  content: " ]"; }

[Su-Laine Yeo]

This is just a guess, but as the formatting info above is needed in order to style conditional text properly, the trigger to include it is probably not configurable. Can you elaborate on what problem it's causing?

[ghkrause]

I do edit my CSS files in an Excel Sheet with Export to CSS. I moved the formatting of the conditional text in the file ..\shared\ditabase-final.css to change it centrally as we like it to appear. But the appending done by XMAU overrides my definitions and wins. This is a brute-force approach in my eyes! It disables any customization for conditional text. Maybe I did something wrong and there is a way that my custom css wins the race against XMAU defaults?

[Su-Laine Yeo]

I see. The system is designed for conditional text color-coding within XMetaL to be configurable by each author, not to be centrally managed. Having said that, upgrading to XMetaL 5.5, which will be on the JustSystems website very soon, may resolve your issue. (The background is that in order to meet Vista requirements we had to change the method by which XMetaL manages conditional text display settings.)

I know that the settings will not be copied to the CSS file anymore, however I don't know if the settings will be stored somewhere else that also overwrites what you put in the CSS.

[XMetaLOldTimer]

You can stop XMetaL from appending these conditional text styling rules by unchecking the option in the Reuse.Style_Conditional_Text dialog (see attachment).  You would have to instruct your users to not enable this option for your CSS rules to win.

As Su-Laine mentioned, XMetaL 5.5 no longer modifies the xxx_ditabase.css file under Program Files.  Instead, the feature was reworked to append the conditional text CSS programmatically using new event macros and APIs.

Regards,
Addam