Archive for the 'DITA' Category

RenderX XEP Setup in oXygen

Published
by
roger
on 2008-08-07 @ 18:19
in DITA and Tools
. 0 Comments

Recently, a client asked for assistance in setting up the RenderX XEP processor for use with the oXygen XML editor on Mac OS X. XEP is an XSL FO processor that can be integrated with oXygen to transform DITA maps to PDF via the PDF2 transformation scenario.

The steps below describe the basic setup, and while the output location is project-specific, the rest should be essentially the same in any environment.

  1. Install XEP (for example, to /Applications/RenderX-XEP)

  2. Point oXygen to XEP executable in oXygen prefs: XML > XSLT-FO-XQuery > FO Processors (Use the Browse button)

  3. Create/verify configuration of PDF2 transformation scenario in oXygen:

  • Open a DITA map file & select Configure Transformation Scenario from the DITA Maps menu.

  • Create new scenario, select PDF2 - Idiom FO Plugin as transformation type

  • In the Edit DITA Scenario dialog:

    • On the FO Processor tab, select XEP from the Processor list.
    • On the Parameters tab, set:
      • args.input to ${cf}
      • dita.dir to ${frameworksDir}/dita/DITA-OT
      • (other parameters optional)
    • Leave the default settings on the Filters tab.
    • On the Advanced tab, set:
      • Custom build file to ${frameworksDir}/dita/DITA-OT/build.xml
      • Java Home to Default, such as /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
    • On the Output tab, set:
      • Base directory to ${cfd}
      • Temp directory to a subfolder of output location, such as …/documentation/output/temp
      • Output folder to a subfolder of SVN documentation checkout location such as …documentation/output/pdf2
    • Click OK to save settings.

  • Click Transform now to create a PDF of the current DITA map.

oXygen 9.2 Improves DITA Support

Published
by
roger
on 2008-05-11 @ 19:20
in DITA, Software and Tools
. 0 Comments

Syncro Soft has released version 9.2 of its <oXygen/> XML Editor, a cross-platform XML authoring tool. The new version includes a new XML Author mode, which provides a streamlined interface tailored to the needs of writers who need to focus on document content and don’t need immediate access to the Schema Editor, XSLT or DTD development tools.

(XML Author is also available as a separate product at 60% of the cost of the full XML Editor suite, though the Author version doesn’t include the Subversion client, which is quite useful in its own right.)

Version 9.2 also includes a number of DITA-specific workflow and usability improvements such as a new DITA Maps Manager to assist with common map authoring tasks, a new Insert Content Reference dialog to aid in the selection of conref IDs, and a bundled version of the recently released DITA Open Toolkit version 1.4.2.1.

Sharing DITA-OT in OS X & Boot Camp

Published
by
roger
on 2008-01-14 @ 19:15
in DITA and Mac
. 0 Comments

If you’re using the DITA Open Toolkit on Mac OS X, you can’t generate compiled HTML Help (CHM) files directly, since Microsoft only offers the HTML Help Workshop for Windows.

But if you also run Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp, you can set up a single installation of the Open Toolkit on your Windows partition and use it to generate output from either operating system environment.

Essentially, you boot into Windows (via VMware, Parallels, or directly) and set up the toolkit there as usual.

Once you have the toolkit running under Windows, create a copy of the Ant build file for your project, adjust the paths for access from Mac OS X and save it under a new name in the DITA-OT directory on your Windows partition. (You’ll call this file later from the Terminal to build your project output on the Mac.)

Back on Mac OS, set up the environment variables required by the toolkit.

You can do this by editing the .bash_profile file in your home directory, or if you don’t like editing hidden UNIX files by hand, you can use freeware such as RCEnvironment or SSHKeychain, which provide a simple dialog that allows you to define environment variables like in Windows.

(In the background, both tools simply write to the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file. SSHKeychain also serves as a nice Mac equivalent to PuTTY, but that’s another story…)

The key here is to use the absolute path to the toolkit installation on the Boot Camp partition. For example, if your Windows partition is named BOOTCAMP and the toolkit lives there at C:\DITA-OT1.4.1, you might set the DITA_HOME variable like this:

DITA_HOME=/Volumes/BOOTCAMP/DITA-OT1.4.1

You can then define the other variables relative to the toolkit directory with entries like this:

ANT_HOME=$DITA_DIR/tools/ant

Note: If you use either of the aforementioned tools to edit ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist, you’ll need to use the full paths for the remaining variables, as $VARIABLE values are not expanded when this file is read.

Once the variables are all set, you’ll need to log in to OS X again to activate them.

Then with a command like this, you can build output from the Terminal using the Mac version of the build file you edited above:

ant -f your-mac-build-file.xml html

To build CHM output, switch to Boot Camp, run startcmd.bat in the DITA-OT directory, and enter something like this on the command line:

ant -f your-windows-build-file.xml chm

If both your build files are set to share an output folder on your Mac, your files will land in the same place, no matter which operating system you build them on.

DITA-OT 1.4.1 Released

Published
by
roger
on 2007-12-03 @ 16:26
in DITA and Open Source
. 0 Comments

An updated version of the DITA Open Toolkit was released last week with several patches, bugfixes and minor enhancements to provide greater control over the output directory and improve error reporting (see the announcement for the full list).

One very useful patch included in this version finally permits styling of the Table of Contents file in HTML output via CSS.

DITA-OT Plug-in for FrameMaker 8

Published
by
roger
on 2007-09-19 @ 13:33
in DITA and FrameMaker
. 0 Comments

The FrameMaker 8 Plug-in for DITA Open Toolkit is now available from Adobe.

The package restores the Generate Output command that was introduced with the FrameMaker 7.2 Application Pack for DITA and unfortunately missing from the released version of FrameMaker 8.

DITA-FMx Plug-in for FrameMaker

Published
by
roger
on 2007-08-21 @ 11:11
in DITA and FrameMaker
. 0 Comments

Leximation and Silicon Publishing have announced the release of DITA-FMx, a new plugin for Adobe FrameMaker that provides extended DITA support and corrects a number of bugs in the Application Pack for DITA.

DITA-FMx is a plugin and set of structure applications that let you create and edit DITA XML files in FrameMaker. The version currently available supports DITA 1.0 and is only available for FrameMaker 7.2. A version that supports DITA 1.1 for FrameMaker 7.2 and 8.0 is under development.

If you’re already using FrameMaker 7.2 with the Application Pack for DITA, this new plugin will not provide new functionality, but does fix/update a number of features available in Beta 2 of the app pack.

DITA Open Toolkit 1.4

Published
by
roger
on 2007-08-15 @ 13:00
in DITA and Open Source
. 0 Comments

Version 1.4 of the DITA Open Toolkit is now available for download from SourceForge, including processing support for the new elements in DITA 1.1 such as bookmaps, index-see and index-see-also entries.

The announcement contains the full list of improvements and bug fixes.

OASIS Approves DITA 1.1

Published
by
roger
on 2007-08-14 @ 22:22
in DITA, Open Source and Standards
. 0 Comments

The DITA Technical Committee at OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has announced the approval of DITA version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard.

Version 1.1 of DITA provides enhanced print publishing capabilities with new DITA Bookmap specialization, including extended book metadata. The standard offers more indexing capabilities with new elements for “see” and “see-also” references. It features new elements for defining structured metadata as well as the ability to add new metadata attributes through specialization.

FrameMaker 8: No DITA-OT Support

Published
by
roger
on 2007-08-01 @ 16:52
in DITA and FrameMaker
. 1 Comment

The DITA application pack that was previously available from Adobe Labs for use with FrameMaker 7.2 has now been rolled in to FrameMaker 8, enhanced to support Unicode and extended to generate a single compound FrameMaker document from a DITA map file.

This latter bit allows you to roll a DITA project into a standalone FrameMaker document, which you can save as a PDF file, for example.

This is all well and good, and was hinted at in various sneak peaks Adobe provided in advance, but there’s one big caveat that they’re not talking about much…

Installation Surprise #3: The version of the app pack included with FM8 doesn’t allow output (such as CHM or HTML) to be generated via the DITA Open Toolkit!

The User Guide dwells on this glaring omission for all of one line:

Note: The DITA application pack no longer supports the functionalities available through the use of the open toolkit (OT).

While it’s understandable that Adobe was not keen on supporting the complexities of DITA-OT configurations with myriad Ant versions, JDK installations and the slew of environment variables that need to be set just right for it all to work, this is certainly a step backwards from the freely available application pack, and hardly the integrated DITA authoring environment many had hoped FM8 might be.

Certainly plug-in authors will step up to the plate to fill this gap, but it would’ve been so much nicer out of the box—after all, it’s really only a batch file that gets called in the background.

Update [2007-08-02] This just in from Adobe:

DITA OT integration with FrameMaker 8 will be available as a web download from Adobe site in a few days.

Thanks, Vivek!

2007-08-31: The Adobe FrameMaker 8 Plug-in for DITA Open Toolkit is now available for download from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/framemaker/fm8_opentoolkit.html.

Adobe Announces FrameMaker 8

Published
by
roger
on 2007-07-30 @ 12:08
in DITA and FrameMaker
. 0 Comments

Adobe has announced that FrameMaker 8.0 will be available by the end of July.

The new features are quite close to the list published earlier and include enhanced XML roundtripping and out-of-the-box DITA support—though it remains to be seen if the DITA features add anything beyond those previously included in the FM 7.2 Application Pack for DITA.

Now downloading, more soon…