Eric Browne wrote: > I've been using XXE Pro for writing and editing a large document (~1000 > topics, one per file) and for generating PDF via XEP. > It's a great editor. > > However, the upgrade to 4.6.1 which I presume includes the April ditac(?) > upgrade that forces unique topic IDs across entire bookmap descendent > components, causes many conversion failures that would take me a long time to > fix. > > Could you please explain: > 1. why this non-DITA-standard test for topic ID uniqueness has been included
A design error in ditac. This design error exists since version 1.0. We are going to work on ditac 2.0 in the next few weeks. Ditac 2.0 will support DITA 1.2 in addition to 1.1 and 1.0. While at it, we intend to remove the following non-DITA-standard requirement: http://www.xmlmind.com/ditac/_distrib/doc/manual/limitations.html#limitations --- Other limitations and specificities * Though not mandated by the DITA standard, XMLmind DITA Converter checks that all the topics which compose the document to be converted have distinct IDs. If this is not the case, a fatal error is reported. This requirement allows to generate easy-to-read, predictable, link targets. See conversion of DITA IDs. --- > [ and do you disagree with Eliot Kimber's view here: > > http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-dita-requires-topic-ids-and-why.html > ?] > What says Eliot Kimber is certainly true. However we'll always prefer to give unique, significant, IDs to all the topics we author here at XMLmind. Moreover, all the tools we design are nicer to use (e.g. the Link tool) and give better results (e.g. more legible, predictable, links in the HTML generated by ditac) if you give unique, significant, IDs to your topics. > 2. whether there is a work around, other than downgrading to an older version? > Sorry but the answer is no. Older versions of ditac also relied on the fact that each topic has a unique ID. However this requirement was not checked at all and ditac did not issue a fatal error. Once again, really sorry for the inconvenience. -- XMLmind DITA Converter Support List [email protected] http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/ditac-support
