Reply To: Element not available in DITA specialization

[Derek Read]

Not sure why I missed it just looking (I had to create some files and play to jog my brain). You have defined so ultimately says it can have the element named “overview”. However, unless the element itself is defined XMetaL won't let you insert it, and you have not defined that element anywhere.

Adding something like the following will allow you to insert it (not sure what you want to define its children as so I've just used PCDATA here to show that it works). You might want to use one of the standard DITA entities (for basic.ph or basic.block for example) instead.

As for the DOCTYPE declaration, when you create a new document from that particular template XMetaL gives you what you see because it is sort of working in a dumb developer-oriented mode at that point. It has no idea what your final intensions are. Its sort of up to you to massage that into the final form you want to give to your real authors and then save the resulting file as a different template file (to save in the Template folder).

I think if you fix the DTD then XMetaL may do a better job of automatically selecting in the Element List as the first element to insert (it basically tries to pick the first one declared in the DTD, it may be confused by what you have in there at the moment).

The “manual change” I was referring to was to do with the DITA Open Toolkits catalog file located here:
catalog-dita_template.xml

If you wish to use the DITA OT that we install to generate output using files based on your specialized DTD then you will need to add appropriate entries to this file so the DITA OT can find them. When you choose Tools > Select Specialized DITA DTD that wizard generates all the required files for authoring in XMetaL only, it does not try to mess with the DITA OT.

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