Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit
posted by Simon Bate
(Scriptorium Publishing is a JustSystems Services Partner.)

My webinar, Key Elements on Customizing and Troubleshooting Output (or Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit) is now available for download. This event was jointly sponsored by Scriptorium Publishing and JustSystems. The recorded version is available here (registration required).

Between modifications one can perform with XMetaL Author Enterprise and those that can be performed in bare-metal (excuse me) OT, there was a lot of territory to cover, so the presentation went a little long (90 minutes or so).

Preparing for this presentation caused me to reflect on the work I used to do, modifying FrameMaker templates. In that work, I figured that 90 to 95 percent of the work was simple style replacement (update the decorations on the master pages, change the font in this paragraph style, add new character spacing to this character style, and so on). That was the easy stuff.

The remaining 5 to 10 percent of the work was the really hard stuff, often where the order of text items changed (building a challenging chapter opener, reimplementing admonitions, replacing cross-reference formats). These are the things that took the time and had me reaching for FrameScript and Advil (not always in that order).

Modifying output from the Open Toolkit is similar. The changes to CSS (or attribute sets), header and footers, basic page layouts, and so on are quite easy to do (whether you do them in XMetaL or directly). The place where you'll spend much more of your time and effort is where the content affects the layout, where order of content matters, or where you have specialized content. This is the realm of XSL and specialization.

Just as with the FrameMaker template modifications, a DITA implementer will have perform these higher-order tasks at some time or another.

Are you looking at using the DITA Open Tookit for production? How much do you expect to have to change in the Open Toolkit output? How are you preparing for this work?
10:11 AM Permalink |