Demystifying
DITA to PDF Publishing
Sarah O'Keefe
Scriptorium Publishing

Housekeeping
Slides and some demo files available after the
presentation; email me.
I will have several question breaks.
Please ask questions.
Emphasis will be on Open Toolkit and InDesign;
no extensive FrameMaker demo.

The five stages of DITA-based
PDF publishing
“How hard could it be?”
“Why is this so $#@!$#@ hard??”
“Maybe I can get this to work with different
tools/people...”
“At least I got our logo on the front page and
nobody knows that I did this.”
“It looks adequate and it publishes in seconds.”

PDF publishing is hard because:
Printed page layouts have more options than
HTML layouts.
Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting
Objects (XSL-FO) needs to support sophisticated
page layout options.
Pushing XML into page layout tools is
challenging.
Automation means giving up page-by-page
formatting.

Please choose one of the following
terrifying options:
DITA Open Toolkit
Page-based layout tool
FrameMaker
InDesign
Quark
Help authoring/conversion tool
RoboHelp
ePublisher Pro
Flare?

What are your PDF priorities?
For typography, choose InDesign or similar.
For automation, choose the DITA Open Toolkit.
For a middle ground, choose FrameMaker.

Lower your standards.
Does your audience care about fine typography?
Less copyfitting = greater automation

What about the help authoring
tools?
Yes, if you need cross-browser,
cross-platform help.
Not the best choice for PDF only.

PDF through the DITA Open Toolkit
Very difficult to configure
No “tweaking” to fix copyfitting problems
Almost certainly the long-term winner

DITA Open Toolkit process
Install the DITA OT (!)
Java
Ant
XSL processor
XSL-FO processor
Modify XSL-FO files to get the output you want
Generate PDF from the command line

DITA Open Toolkit challenges
Fonts
Formatting
Foggy FO
FOP foibles

DITA Open Toolkit demo

Questions about DITA Open Toolkit?

PDF via FrameMaker
Configuration requires modifying a formatting
template
Nice PDF
Can tweak to adjust pagination

FrameMaker process
Modify the template to meet your requirements
Open the map file
(v8 and earlier) Generate intermediate book
Save as PDF

Only sort of fake FrameMaker demo

FrameMaker pitfalls
Sensitive to whitespace
DITA specializations
Round-tripping
Authoring

FrameMaker recommendations
Use DITA-FMx plug-in

Questions about FrameMaker?

PDF via InDesign
Beautiful typography
Can tweak to adjust pagination
No default support for DITA
Extensive configuration required
Whitespace in XML results in anaphylactic
shock for InDesign

InDesign process
Transform DITA content into “InDesign-friendly”
XML via XSLT
Flatten map files
Resolve and flatten content references (conrefs)
Modify structure of images and tables
Control whitespace
Do something about xrefs with InDesign scripts
Set up template in InDesign
Import modified XML into InDesign

InDesign challenges
Extensive preprocessing
Round-tripping
Authoring
Whitespace

Questions about InDesign?

Factors to consider
Platform requirements
Technical resources
Typography requirements
Velocity
Volume
Versioning

Questions