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Subject: Re: [dita] Scenario for cross-deliverable referencing


Hi Michael,

Forgive if I have missed something from previous discussions about this particular requirement.

Should the scenario be expanded to also include links across publications (maps) and not just limited to chapters with a book? This is certainly a situation which we have come up against with customers, where, for example, a chapter in a user guide may refer to a chapter in an admin guide.

Or, are you implying this through the use of a series of nested maps – where each mapref links to a complete publication?

Kind regards

 

Mark Poston

Senior Technical Consultant

Mekon Ltd.

Tel. +44 20 8722 8461

Mob: +44 7515 906032 

Skype: mark_mekon.com

Twitter: mekonmark


From: Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 15:19:46 +0100
To: "dita@lists.oasis-open.org" <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: [dita] Scenario for cross-deliverable referencing


This was my todo from last week's mtg - sorry I'm leaving it to the wire.

This describes a solution that can be implemented today - I still think there more work to be done, including:

-  a general solution for key scoping (but not deliverable-based scoping since the boundaries of deliverables are mutable, as I'm trying to show here).
- a standardized approach for cross-deliverable referencing - if we want to encourage this approach, for example, or propose an alternative - but we should be providing some guidance to vendors on how to implement so that the solution is cross-vendor compatible

scenario:
- we need to produce PDFs for each chapter of a book, as well as a single big PDF that contains all chapters
- the chapters contain cross-references to content in other chapters, which needs to be resolved as a cross-deliverable link in the single-chapter PDFs but as a local link in the single big PDF case
- each chapter is represented by a separate map
- each topicref in the map has a uniquely addressable key (using whatever general scoping mechanism we choose to implement)
- the book as a whole is represented by a master map that pulls in the others

solution for individual chapter case:
- for each chapter, execute a partial PDF build, which does not transform the content but does preprocess the map to turn each topicref href into a form appropriate for the deliverable being produced (ie, including the filename of the PDF being produced, with appropriate anchor syntax)
        this results in a deliverable-specific set of key mappings
- for each chapter, create a master map that includes the chapter being built and then resource-only inclusionsof the deliverable-specific maps for all other chapters
- for each chapter's master map, execute a full PDF build
        this results in a chapter-level PDF with all links to other chapter resolved correctly

solution for whole book case:
- build normally

Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Lead IBM DITA Architect
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25


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