Is it possible to use flagging without beginning and ending art?

[JoAnne]

This is probably a DITA-OT question, but I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I'm using XMetaL 6.0, running on Windows 7.

I have a ditaval file that adds background color to flagged revprops. When I generate WebHelp, the flagged content does have the background color, but is enclosed by the delta.gif (>>)  and deltaend.gif  (<<) art. Is there a way to remove the gif files and not use any art? Thanks, as always.

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[Derek Read]

See the italicized sentence in the quote below.

[quote=DITA Language Reference 1.1]The startflag takes an optional image reference and an optional alt-text element for identifying the beginning of flagged content. If an image is specified, the specified image will be used to flag the beginning of the content, with the alt-text contents as alternative text. If alt-text is specified without an image, that text will be used to flag the content instead of an image. If no image and no alt-text are specified, then this element has no defined purpose. The startflag element is allowed inside either prop or revprop.

The DITA LangRef says says basically the same thing for endflag.

This is the way the DITA Language Reference says things should work, but in reality I'm not sure if it actually does with DITA OT 1.4.2.1 (which is what you are probably running given your version of XMetaL Author Enterprise). I'd need to set up some tests to check on this. If this works for regular HTML then it should also work for WebHelp as WebHelp uses the standard DITA OT XHTML transtype for the HTML that make up the topics.

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[Derek Read]

OK, so it works as described. Here's the ditaval file I'm using:

START ONLY TEXTEND ONLY TEXT

To test I have the following XML in a topic:

This is a paragraph.

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[Derek Read]

I see that there are some issues though (apparently addressed in DITA OT 1.5 which we plan to include with our next release):

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2008294&group_id=132728&atid=725074

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[JoAnne]

Thanks, Derek.  Exactly what I needed. It even works if alt text is empty, which is what I needed in this case. I'm using background shading, so I didn't want anything before or after the flagged text.

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