Author Archives: bcolborn

Chunking vs. nesting

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At the blog I’d rather be writing there is some concern about navigability when the content set has too many small files. The solution discussed is to use @chunk="to-content", but that’s not the only option.

Although it’s common practice to have one topic per file, it’s not required. If you are not going to be reusing topics in multiple contexts you might prefer to have multiple topics in the same file.

For example:

<!DOCTYPE dita PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Composite//EN" "ditabase.dtd">
<dita>
  <concept id="concept_bm1_q4m_yj">
    <title>About widgets</title>
    <conbody>
      <p>Widgets are very useful.</p>
    </conbody>
    <task id="task_bm1_q4m_yj">
      <title>Create a widget</title>
      <taskbody>
        <steps> ... </steps>
      </taskbody>
    </task>
    <task id="task_bm1_q4m_yk">
      <title>Drag a widget in place</title>
      <taskbody>
        <steps> ... </steps>
      </taskbody>
    </task>
  </concept>
</dita>

The question about relying primarily on TOC is an interesting one discussed by Jonatan Lundin here and Mark Baker here.

DITA to PPT mapping

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In a discussion about my previous post on the LinkedIn DITA Awareness group, the question of mapping DITA elements to PPT was raised. Because the answer is too long to comfortably fit in the discussion thread I’ll answer it here. There are two aspects: conditions and element selection/mapping.

For the conditions, the normal Open Toolkit filtering with ditaval is used.

  • @otherprops="slide" is explicitly included in the PPT and implicitly included in PDF.
  • @audience="instructor" is explicitly included in the PPT and explicitly excluded from PDF.
  • @otherprops="noslide" is explicitly excluded from PPT and implicitly included in PDF.

The question of element selection and mapping is a bit more complicated. First, the PPT template has three bullet levels defined. The first is meant for unbulleted items, for example learning objectives lead in. The second is meant for bulleted and numbered items, for example step and li elements. The third is meant for command and output references, for example codeblock and msgblock.

In the PPT utility, XPath expressions are mapped to one of these three paragraph styles or to an object.
XPath expression PPT mapping
$t//ph[$s] P1 unbulleted
$t//p[$s] P1 unbulleted
$t//*[$s]/li P2 bulleted
$t//sl[$s]/sli P2 unbulleted
$t//dl[$s]/dlentry/dt P2 bulleted
$t//codeblock[$s] P3 fixed-width
$t//msgblock[$s] P3 fixed-width
$t//steps[$s]/step/cmd P2 numbered
$t//steps[$s]/step/info/codeblock P3 fixed-width
$t//fig/image/@href image object
$t//image/@href image object
$t//note[contains(@audience,'instructor')] note object
$t//lcObjectivesStem P1 unbulleted
$t//lcObjectivesGroup//lcObjective P2 bulleted
$t//table[$s] table object
$t//simpletable[$s] table object

The variables $t and $s are also XPath expressions that I put into variables to keep the other expressions legible:

  • $t = "child::*[contains(@class, ' topic/body ')]"
  • $s = "contains(@otherprops, 'slide')"
Edit: correction on filtering logic.

PowerPoint Output in an ant Task

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For several years now I have been working on utilities to convert DITA to PowerPoint, as I have discussed elsewhere. The original implementation was as a VBA macro stored inside a PPT template. I won’t go on at length about all the limitations that VBA has; suffice it to say that it’s verbose and not very robust. My colleagues in the training group requested some enhancements and I couldn’t bear the thought of spending much time in VBA.

So I decided to rewrite it in PowerShell. Other posts in Ditanauts have detailed working with XML files in PowerShell, which I have found to work pretty well. In addition, PowerShell has much better capabilities for exception handling, and it can manipulate PPT objects.

Continue reading →

Configuring Fonts for the Open Toolkit with Apache FOP

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While I can’t justify the cost for an expert stylesheet developer or a fancy PDF renderer, I don’t wan’t my PDFs to look like garbage either. Using Jarno Elivirta’s PDF plugin generator is a great place to start for PDF customization, and Apache FOP (bundled with the Open Toolkit) is my only option for a PDF renderer. Once I did a lot of the work in a PDF plugin, I got to the point where I wanted to change fonts. Although despite overuse there’s nothing too offensive about Times New Roman + Arial + Courier, that font set doesn’t conform to any branding guidelines that have been given any thought.

Should be pretty easy to do what I wanted, right?

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Reporting on your repository with PowerShell, part 2

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A couple months ago, some developers and support engineers were looking over some documentation and said to me, “These procedures are too complicated!” To which I said, “I know! I made them as simple as possible, but I can do only so much within the constraints of the interface.” Then the engineers asked me an astounding question: “Can you give us some complexity measure on each procedure so we know where to start making things simpler?” Because I knew how to use PowerShell to get information out of my set of DITA topics, I calmly said, “Let me look into it” while inside I was bursting with excitement. Continue reading →

The Limits of Minimalism

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At my previous company, I championed the principles of minimalism in documentation. While minimalism is not specifically DITA-related, content development in DITA benefits from applying the principles, and DITA certainly works well with some of the principles. And recently there was discussion on the dita-users list about how different types of information architectures may be expressed in DITA.

I don’t have to champion the principles of minimalism any more, because my one colleague and I are in alignment. But I have been finding that minimalism has limits to its applicability. Continue reading →

Reporting on your DITA repository with PowerShell

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As a long-time Unix bigot, it pains me to say but I have to be honest: I really like PowerShell, Microsoft’s new-ish scripting language. In fact, it has an advantage over Unix shell scripting languages in that it is fundamentally based on objects rather than on strings. Now what else do I use daily that is object-based? XML of the DITA kind, of course.

While there are a number of good articles on using PowerShell with XML, I thought I’d take you through a use case specifically with DITA. Continue reading →

FrameMaker is a real DITA editor…a very poor one

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Last month, a pair of blog posts dueled over using FrameMaker for authoring XML.

Since the bullets were flying, I thought I would let off some shots of my own. I can’t speak to other XML use cases or schemas, but I do have a comment about using FrameMaker for DITA. Starting in November of 2011, I had to use FrameMaker 10 as a DITA editor for about six weeks until I had time to reconfigure the publishing process for another tool (and pretty up PDF output with mypdf). I’ve had a good deal of experience with writing and producing DITA content with XMetaL, and I agree with the criteria that Mr. Aldous sets out. So I can say that, yes, FrameMaker is a real XML editor.

It’s a really really lousy one.

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