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Subject: Issues relating to creating HTML Help from DITA
Hi fellow DITA Help SC members, I recently met up with UK-based author Ian Balanza-Davis at the X-Pubs Conference at Heathrow. He has been doing some interesting work using the DITA Open Toolkit to create Microsoft HTML Help. He has encountered a number of issues and wondered whether these were being addressed by the DITA Help TC. Ian's issues are as follows: -- Child CHMs cannot be included in a ditamap, as there is no type="chm" option that could be picked up and used during processing. -- Window definitions cannot be created. Currently a definition is hardwired into the Dita open toolkit, but again there is nothing in place to define windows through Dita. (This would also be more than a little helpful for context-sensitive help.) -- He can only create a hierarchy of HTML headings by having multiple topics within a single file rather than through a ditamap. (He has raised this with John Hunt, but has yet to get a reply.) -- The default topic in a TOC is hardwired in the output, but there are many good reasons not to have the first topic in a TOC as the default. -- There seems to be no way to convert See Also links (ALinks) to Active X, or include javascript in Dita. That seems to be a bit of a hole for IE-based resources (and web-based in general). I told him that I would pass on the list of issues to the committee. It seems to me a pretty good checklist of items that we should ensure are addressed, particularly in relation to HTML Help. Any thoughts on these issues? -Matthew Matthew Ellison Consulting Ltd 5 College Road Ringwood, Hampshire BH24 1NU, UK +44 (0)1425 489 263 matthew@ellisonconsulting.com www.ellisonconsulting.com
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