Douglas W Philips wrote: > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Hussein Shafie <hussein at xmlmind.com > <mailto:hussein at xmlmind.com>> wrote: > > > 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, > > So you confirm that, using ditac (i.e. not the ODT), there is currently > *no* *problem* performing any kind of filtering/flagging you want, as > long as you specify the conditionals at the DITA xml level (e.g. a > paragraph). > > > Yes, that is correct. > > In fact, it works even if you do not specialize the DTD files. We > learned that several months ago and it was a great boon to getting > started because we didn't have to change anything, we could just make up > new attributes and values and put them into the ditaval files and it > -just-worked-. > > Of course now that we are finishing our conversion process and looking > to move forward, we want to specialize so that our tools can help our > authors. The fact that DITAC is not a validating processor means we have > to run the Open Toolkit to make sure we haven't made any mistakes, so it > is a mixed bag.
Ditac assumes that DITA topics and maps have been created using a validating XML editor such as XMLmind XML Editor. By the way XMLmind XML Editor, even free Personal Edition, includes a very powerful command-line tool called xmltool. See http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/xmltool/index.html > > > > This would take almost as long as really fixing the problem. If you > confirm the above status, may be the problem is not as severe as we > first thought it was. > > > Yes, confirmed above. > That sounds like good news! We'll try to release a new version of ditac which fixes *all* the problems you have encountered at the same time as XMLmind XSL-FO Converter v4.4, that is, in 2-3 weeks. > > > > The first step for us will be to learn more about the "props" attribute > and how it may be used to specify extra conditional processing > attributes. (I'm just guessing: despite the fact that I've read the DITA > spec several times, I don't remember *anything* related to this.) > > > The props attribute is what the new conditionals inherit from, it isn't > meant to be used directly (just as topic is not meant to be used directly). For topics, this is not that clear: Excerpts of http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/OS/langspec/langref/topic.html : --- The <topic> element is the top-level DITA element for a single-subject topic or article. Other top-level DITA elements that are more content-specific are <concept>, <task>, <reference>, and <glossary>. --- Moreover my common sense tells me that in some cases, there is nothing wrong with directly authoring topics. > > > > We'll happily accept any contribution which truly improves ditac, > especially if this improves the *looks* of what is generated by ditac. > We are still far from the typographic quality of what was generated by > FrameMaker. > > > OK. I won't be looking into that until next week, and will start a new > thread(s) on this list as appropriate. Foremost concern is deciding how > to resolve the above issue. > I would suggest an even longer pause if you want next version of ditac to be released in due time. We are a small company with few developers and answering support requests, yours and many others on several other mailing lists, takes an enormous amount of time.
