Author Archives: the ditanauts team

QA Plugin Updated! (Finally, right?)

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Hi folks, I’m happy to let you know that we have posted a major update to the QA Plugin. The ditanauts team owes a huge debt of gratitude to Don Day and Michael Boses for their work on this update. What’s new you ask? Well…

  • Reports are prettier. The HTML report we generate uses Google Charts to render visual elements.
  • We create a data file (written in DITA) rather than generating the report HTML directly from the DITA input. With the data file, you can then render whatever you want using normal OT processing. The plugin creates an HTML report and a .csv file from the data file.
  • @Chunk set automatically on bookmaps. One of the really annoying things with the old version was that you had to set the @chunk attribute manually before a build. That is no longer the case when building from a bookmap!
I’ve updated the install and run sections of the how-to page; I will be updating the customization section soon.
Let us know what you think!

Automagically Check Tagging, Terminology, and More

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If you have more than one writer on your team (and perhaps if you have exactly one), enforcing terminology, tagging, and other standards can be challenging. We wanted an easy way to catch simple issues, like lists nested inside paragraphs and the use of out-of-date console names. We also wanted to verify, across a large document set, that certain DITA attributes were used correctly in order to make our output as reliable as possible. We started with a PowerShell script written by Ben Colborn, which included a large number of xpath-based quality assurance checks. We’ve since ported those checks into an open toolkit plugin, and we are happy to say we can now share it here on sourceforge.

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