On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 6:49 AM, Hussein Shafie <hussein at xmlmind.com> wrote:
> --> I now understand what you want to achieve and why you prefer to do
> it this way.
>
> There are probably more issues with ditac than you imagine. In order to
> fix *all* the problems, we need an example (topics, map, *several*
> ditavals), as simple as possible, showing *all* the features you need.
>
I'm not sure how to reply to this. We are using several custom conditional
attributes.
As we adapt our document into DITA we will probably add more. There is
nothing that we have read about DITA to indicate that there are any "hard
coded" limits to this customization. We have five new conditionals that
capture the pre-existing conditionals that were used in the FrameMaker
versions of our documents. Any combination of those five dimensions is
possible.
I imagine we'll be adding a few more as we continue to adapt our content to
DITA.
The only difference between our conditionals and "platform" or "product" or
"audience" or .. is that we have defined them instead of them being defined
by the DITA spec. They operate in exactly the same way.
For example, you'll have to show us how you specify: include this
>
element but only when customer="X" and situation="Y".
>
<p customer="x" interface="y" deliverable="z">...</p> is a paragraph that
only gets included when all those things are included. If we exclude any one
of them, the paragraph as a whole is exluded. This is, as we understand it,
the way conditionals work in DITA. The only difference here is that we're
using custom/specialized conditionals instead of the ones hard-coded in
DITA.
This is already working! at the DITA xml level, it is only at the map level
that it is not working, which is very confusing to us. How is it that we can
conditionalize a paragraph correctly, but not a topicref? I know, I know,
you explained how ditac processes map-file topicref's already. What baffles
us is that the fundamental "conditional processing" would be so different.
Ditac currently has a low priority on our development schedule.
> Therefore I'm sorry to say that it may take weeks, if not months, before
> we release a new version of ditac.
Understood. I am wondering if you can release a new version quickly that
just flags as an error any attributes on topicrefs which are (currently)
being ignored? That would at least give us a safety net that we aren't going
to release something marked as super-secret by accident because the topicref
filtering was being ignored. :)
> Thank you for your patience and thank you for helping us to improve
> XMLmind DITA Converter (ditac).
>
Overall I am very happy with ditac. Since it is in the open source part of
the XMLmind products, is there a way that we could contribute back to it? I
see from the archives that it was released last fall (2009), so I'm not
surprised that there are still some rough edges. (This is important to us
because there are some customizations we'd like to do with XSL processing
that DITAC currently does not expose, but that is a larger topic for another
thread).
Thanks,
-Doug
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