DITA and XMetaL Discussion
XMetaL Community Forum › DITA and XMetaL Discussion › context-sensitive text formatting of DITA output
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jbrewer36 August 8, 2011 at 4:08 pm
context-sensitive text formatting of DITA output
August 8, 2011 at 4:08 pmParticipants 0Replies 1Last Activity 11 years, 5 months agoI am a former user of structured FrameMaker 9.0, where I learned to use the EDD file to
modify element definitions as well as tweak text formatting rules that used element context
to determine the attributes (font, indentation, color, size, etc.) of the text that appears
in the output format (PDF in my case). A rule, for example, would determine the proper
formatting of a
element based on its position in a ditamap hierarchy. </p> <p> I am now authoring DITA topics with XMetaL Author 6.0.2. I need to know what files perform </p> <p>the same text formatting decisions as the Frame EDD file. I have studied various CSS files </p> <p>but don't see any context rules in them. I have read some of the DITA Open Toolkit </p> <p>documentation, which refers to XSLT files rather than CSS, for transforming source XML to </p> <p>output formats such as XHTML, PDF, or CHM. I need a clear introduction to the options </p> <p>available and recommended for customizing text formatting to achieve an attractive and </p> <p>consistent appearance for our help files. Derek Read August 8, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Reply to: context-sensitive text formatting of DITA output
August 8, 2011 at 6:42 pmThe DITA Open Toolkit does not have a direct equivalent to FrameMaker's EDD file. The DITA Open Toolkit primarily uses XSLT (as you have read) and for a few complex things when generating PDF files it relies a little bit on Java.
As the DITA Open Toolkit is 3rd party software we do not attempt to document how to make changes to it. You may wish to search for solutions that sound similar to your needs on one of various forums, or post your specific questions there. The following two DITA OT forums are fairly active:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/xmetal-dita/The first is more active as the audience is wider and generally discusses DITA in general. Though it doesn't deal with the DITA OT specifically, many (seems like most) of the discussions center around ways to customize it as well as problems with it. It is probably best to write questions with the assumption that the reader will not have access to or know anything about XMetaL.
The second is more specific to XMetaL + DITA and often has questions and answers about customizing the DITA OT (the majority are of this type in fact).
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