infotexture » DITA

PDF2: Removing Page Numbers from Cross References and Customizing Cover Pages

roger — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:47:54 +0000

Dan Ochs of Wrycan Inc. has posted several nice tutorials on customizing the output produced by the DITA Open Toolkit PDF2 Plugin:

one covers removing page numbers from cross references, and
another explains how to modify PDF2 cover pages to include a company logo.

Nice job Dan!

DITA-OT 1.5 Milestone 10

roger — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:32:23 +0000

Today Robert Anderson announced the availability of Milestone 10 of the DITA Open Toolkit version 1.5.

This test build provides insight into development progress toward the next toolkit release, which is scheduled to support the upcoming DITA 1.2 specification. For details, see the wiki page titled “Plans for DITA Open Toolkit version 1.5.”

Among the changes in Milestone 10 are a number of updates to the PDF2 plugin. The print=no attribute setting is now honored, and a new basic settings file has been added to the plugin to make customization easier. For the full list of changes, see “Plans for the DITA Open Toolkit PDF2 Plug-in.”

Customizing PDF2 Output

roger — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:12:21 +0000

When customizing the output of the Idiom PDF2 plugin for the DITA Open Toolkit to display product-specific headers and footers, or different fonts and logos for different clients, customizations can be stored in separate folders and referenced in the Ant build file using the customization.dir property.

To store customizations for Project A and Project B, copy the contents of your customization folder (typically DITA-OT\demo\fo\Customization) to

DITA-OT\demo\fo\Customization-A and
DITA-OT\demo\fo\Customization-B,

then add lines like this to your projects’ build scripts:

[via dita-users #12788 & #12810]

DITA for WordPress

roger — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:11:11 +0000

Claude Vedovini has released a set of plugins for the DITA Open Toolkit and WordPress that allow you to publish DITA content to a WordPress site.

According to the announcement, the OT plugin can be used to transform a DITA map into a single file, and send the result to the blog via the XML-RPC API. In order for the plugin to work, you’ll need to first create a dummy post in WordPress or your client of choice, and specify the post ID as an argument in your Ant build script.

While you wouldn’t want to create new blog posts daily with this method, it can be a very useful means of providing external reviewers with access to the latest versions of your documentation.

The WordPress plugin adds an extra line of code to the generated HTML to include a stylesheet with rules for the various DITA elements (you’ll almost certainly want to adapt this for your own CI guidelines, as you would for any other HTML output from the Open Toolkit). As an alternative, you could also pull in the dita.css file via an @import rule in your WordPress theme stylesheet.

As of WordPress 2.7, the XML-RPC option is disabled by default, so you’ll need to enable in the Admin interface under Settings > Writing and modify the xmlrpc.php template as described in the announcement.