Link to a topic heading?

[Fa]

Is it possible to link to a topic heading (i.e. the folder icon that appears in the DITA map)? If it is, how do I do it?

I thought of linking to the first topic of the heading (the page number will then be correct), but then is there a workaround to prevent the topic title from appearing, and instead of it to have the topic heading title?

If not, I guess I do not have the DITA way of thinking yet… I'm just trying to convert existing manuals to DITA, which is not always easy.

Cheers!

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[ghkrause]

Hi Fa,
Could you send some code snippets with tags in it to understand what you mean by “linking to” and “topic title” versus “topic heading title”?
There are many ways to link and many different possible targets in DITA. And tell which output format you are interested in.
Maybe the [url=http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/]http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/[/url] is a better place for general DITA questions. I do not see the XMetaL specific part in the question.

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[Su-Laine Yeo]

Hi Fa,

That's actually a really good question. The folder icons in the Map Editor represent Topic Headings, which are DITA elements. I've found that I can make a cross-reference to a element in a map, but it doesn't appear properly in output. According to the DITA language reference (http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD02/langspec/common/thetypeattribute.html), “topichead” is not a valid target of a cross-reference, so I believe that cross-references to elements is just not within the realm of DITA.

What you can do instead of using a Topic Heading is to use a topic containing a title and nothing else. It is easy to make a cross-reference to a topic. There are other advantages to this approach, in particular that translation management systems tend to handle it better.

By the way, Gunnar is right that general DITA questions are usually answered more efficiently in the dita-users Yahoo! group. It's sometimes hard to know whether a problem is purely DITA or involves XMetaL, so there's no harm in posting it here to see if we can address it.

Cheers,
Su-Laine

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[Fa]

ghkrause and Su-Laine Yeo, thanks a lot for your answers! They address the first of my issues. I have many more questions, but since I think they are more related to DITA than XMetaL, I'll see if I can find answers from the Yahoogroup dedicated to DITA.

Cheers,

Fa

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[Phil Champ]

What you can do instead of using a Topic Heading is to use a topic containing a title and nothing else. It is easy to make a cross-reference to a topic. There are other advantages to this approach, in particular that translation management systems tend to handle it better.

We have used this method to save our translators from having to translate the ditamap. However, you can only insert cross-references to the “empty” topics if the output is PDF. With a CHM, you end up with a link to a page with nothing on it except the title.

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