DITA: Configuring XMetaL Author Enterprise to Generate Localized CHM Files

[Derek Read]

Product(s):
XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.1+ (working with DITA Map and Topics)

Description:
Instructions included in the attached PDF document explain how to configure XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.1 to generate CHM files with the Contents, Index and Search tab features fully enabled for languages other than English from a DITA Map and associated topics.

The PDF instructions are included inside the zip file named Configuring_XMetaL_Author_Enterprise_to_Generate_Localized_CHM_Files.zip

Problem and Solution:
When a CHM file that has been generated using the standard DITA OT and HTML Help Workshop is viewed in the standard Windows help viewer (HTML Help Viewer or hh.exe), Internet Explorer is used to render the content for each topic in the content pane (on the right side). Internet Explorer is typically able to render this content as it is a Unicode capable application. This often causes confusion because this content is rendered correctly while the text in the Contents and Index tabs may not be, and the Search functionality may be broken.

After following the steps in this document the files that the DITA Open Toolkit generates
will be re-encoded before they are passed to HTML Help Workshop. Normally, output from
the DITA OT is encoded in UTF-8 (Unicode) but because HTML Help Workshop is a
legacy tool it requires input documents to be encoded using Windows codepages.

Reply

[mmoulder]

Derek,

Do you know where you can get a list of the localID per language and the charset that should be used for each language? In your PDF you have examples for some of the languages, but we use many more.

Reply

[Derek Read]

The PDF only lists those I have personally tested (as examples).

The PDF also includes information on where to find the codes required for other languages on pages 7 and 8 inside the topic “Parameter Formats and References”.

If you test other values and confirm they work I would be interested in adding them to this document so that others may benefit from this information.

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[mmoulder]

Where are the outputs stored so I can distribute those to the other writers without them having to create all the 29 different language outputs for chm files?

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[Derek Read]

Settings are stored in this file for each user:

%appdata%SoftQuadXMetaLprint_local.xml

Note that if you were to make settings changes and then distribute the same file to multiple users you might need to check inside the file for any full paths and replace those with Windows path variables (ie: %variablename%). Doing this is not something we test or officially support at the moment so I cannot say for sure what the exact configuration should be. You may wish to compare the per user version of the file (the one above) against the one we install to see what the path variables are set to by default:
C:Program FilesXMetaL AuthorDITAXACssharedrenditionsprint_local.xml

Reply

[Fa]

Hi Derek,

Would you have an updated guide for Windows7? I find myself having TOC and Index display issues in non-English languages.

Best regards,

Fabien

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[Derek Read]

I do not. I have quite a few things going on this week but if I can get some time I could run some tests on Windows 7 and see what is different.

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