I just wanted to second that. It’s an issue we regularly come up against and some guidelines would really help.
From: Mark Poston [mailto:]
Sent: 06 September 2011 16:55
To: Michael Priestley;
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 <>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 15:19:46 +0100
To: "" <>
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
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
