Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing

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

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Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing

by Scriptorium Publishing on Mar 23, 2009

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Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing — Presentation Transcript