Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO
Hi list, I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most helpful! Best, Mica
On 5/22/2014 7:11 PM, Mica Semrick wrote:
Hi list,
I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most helpful!
I must admit that I've never heard of DITA XML. Concerning FO ... I once made something for mkii, and I think I must have some first code for mkiv but never saw a good reason for finishing that (shouldn't be too hard) especially because in practice it's often easier to directly write an xml mapping and then use the mechanisms that context has available for getting a better output. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Hans, Thanks for your reply. I found my way to foxet, but never got it working. I've written several mapping files for XML with good results, but DITA is a bit of a different beast. DITA is geared towards technical writing, and its main features are defined content types, a mechanism for controlled reuse below the file level, a modular structure, and built in extensibility of its XML vocabulary. It comes with its own toolkit that filters out and pulls in content and it uses FOP to produce PDF (hence my mention of FO). Since the toolkit must process the XML to resolve linked content and remove content, it is not recommended to directly typeset the XML like you could do with DocBook. I see a few ways to achieve what I want, which is a PDF produced my ConTeXt: target a merged XML file that the dita toolkit has produced, produce a concatenated HTML file and typeset that, or typeset the fo file before FOP gets to it. Of those approaches, the first seems like the best idea, but I wanted to query the list before proceeding. Thanks for your time. Best, Mica
On 5/23/2014 1:30 AM, Mica Semrick wrote:
Hi Hans,
Thanks for your reply. I found my way to foxet, but never got it working. I've written several mapping files for XML with good results, but DITA is a bit of a different beast.
that's mkii and will not work in mkiv
DITA is geared towards technical writing, and its main features are defined content types, a mechanism for controlled reuse below the file level, a modular structure, and built in extensibility of its XML vocabulary. It comes with its own toolkit that filters out and pulls in content and it uses FOP to produce PDF (hence my mention of FO). Since the toolkit must process the XML to resolve linked content and remove content, it is not recommended to directly typeset the XML like you could do with DocBook. I see a few ways to achieve what I want, which is a PDF produced my ConTeXt: target a merged XML file that the dita toolkit has produced, produce a concatenated HTML file and typeset that, or typeset the fo file before FOP gets to it. Of those approaches, the first seems like the best idea, but I wanted to query the list before proceeding.
best just skip to fop stage and directly map the html (or whatever intermediate format) then ... the more info gets lost, the worse the result will look as the typesetting engine works better on abstractions (chapters and so) then on boxes pasted together ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
On 2014-05-22 Mica Semrick wrote:
I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most helpful!
What is your real use case? A typical XML based workflow involves XSL-FO -> PDF route using FO processor (Antenna House, XEP, FOP etc). Anyway, there are several ways. If you are not locked to DITA yet, I would strongly recommend switching to DocBook instead :-) You get similar single source solution with the semantically rich vocabulary that allows you to produce all typical outputs. Moreover, there is a special project dedicated to DocBook to ConTeXt conversion 'dbcontext' http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/releases/download.html although I had to tweak it for my recent project to ensure compatibility with current ConTeXt version (MkIV). This XSLT way is most natural for XML processing, but I understand that writing XSLT transformation is discouraging for many people. Regards, Jan
participants (3)
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Hans Hagen -
Jan Tosovsky -
Mica Semrick