Generating print output from DITA using CSS
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The traditional XLS-FO language to create PDF output is difficult and costly. New paged media features in CSS provide significant print output capabilities.
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Generating print output from DITA using CSS
- 1. CSS for Print Presented by: Jim Mandas and Mark Giffin
- 2. Molina Healthcare Regulated content. No DITA experience 2
- 9. What is a stylesheet language?
- 10. Two options to style XML 1. Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) 2. Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) 10
- 11. The Challenge 11
- 12. This is me the day our consultant left
- 15. My Challenge
- 18. Mark Giffin 18
- 21. GitHub DITA-CSS plug-in Existing CSS-to-PDF plugin
- 22. – In-house web developers unfamiliar with XML – To say nothing of DITA, class attributes etc. Existing CSS-to-PDF plugin
- 23. – Modular CSS setup with many separate files - our developers asked for a single CSS file Existing CSS-to-PDF plugin
- 24. • Single XHTML file (@chunk="to-content" on map) • CSS is applied to familiar HTML DITA OT XHTML output
- 25. • CSS PDF worked with our formatting • Automated Section 508 accessibility compliance • Simplicity • In-house developers were happy! DITA OT XHTML Output
- 26. Lucky breaks
- 27. Things we didn’t get with XHTML transtype Generated chapter TOCs But they can be added Generated main TOC 27
- 28. Will it work with our CCMS?
- 29. It worked!
- 30. It worked!
- 31. Parts of CSS used
- 32. • Uses DITA OT xhtml transtype • New OT transtype: molina.css.pdf • @chunk=“to content” on DITA map file to create a single output HTML file • Pass XHTML and CSS to Antenna House to produce the PDF • A few changes to default XHTML output have been made • Added several @outputclass attributes in DITA source • Plan to open source what we do Details
- 33. Plans
- 34. CSS for Print Conclusion
- 35. The Backstory
Editor's Notes
- Molina Healthcare is a FORTUNE 500 health care organization who arranges the delivery of health care services to nearly four million members who receive their care through Medicaid, Medicare and other government-funded programs We provide our services in12 states and employ over 20 thousand people To give you an idea of our recent growth, in 2013 we had 1.5M members and 4K employees.
- Molina publishes member materials, such as health benefits, provider office directories and formularies. The document structure and layout design is created and regulated by the federal government. A large portion of the content is the common across product lines and across states. There are many opportunities to apply conditional filtering for example on the legal disclaimers and contact center phone numbers. The publications are translated into multiple languages; in some states up to 12 languages are required. In the healthcare market, the print channel is still alive as we print and mail member materials to all of our members. We also deliver our member materials to the website channel. All web content must comply with the 508 accessibility standard; which means that if a member connects a screen reader application to the site, the content is successfully read.
- Legacy publishing environment and culture. Molina is a 35 year old company that has always used Word Perfect or MS Word. No frame Maker experience. No DITA experience No centralized publishing department No enterprise content management.
- Connie Fleischer, Molina’s new VP of content strategy, worked on the DITA business case in 2013 and 2014. Connie documented a strong return on the investment due to the large translation savings, process efficiency improvements, and cost reduction from content reuse. Connie hired Jim Mandas in early 2015 to lead the implementation and run the new technical publication operations. We then hired our first technical writer and engaged a DITA consulting firm to help us build out our first publication.
- Our first DITA pilot We purchased our component content management system in March of 2015 and started development of our first publication in April 2015. For our first PDF publication we selected the XSL-FO stylesheet language to develop the stylesheet.
- What is a stylesheet language and why do I need one? XML and HTML are both markup languages and are both designed to separate content from the layout. The XML and HTML languages are used to create the document structure and a separate stylesheet language is used to create the layout.
- There are two options to style XML XSL-FO is the traditional way to style XML DITA for PDF output CSS can also be used to style XML
- This is me the day our consulting contract ended Stylesheet development is a significant portion of the budget Not one person in our 1000 staff IT department knew the XSL-FO language. FO is a difficult language to learn FO is a specialized language and difficult to find resources Ongoing reliance on outside resources I was frustrated. So I started drawing.
- So we can transform DITA to HTML And I know we style an HTML webpage with CSS What if we converted a webpage into PDF? Could we format a webpage into a print-quality PDF?
- So I started researching I met several people that use CSS as part of their PDF workflow. O’Reilly Media prints all their books using CSS and a stylesheet application called Antenna House. I learned that the Antenna House typesetting software I own has a CSS version. I learned that the CSS language has print layout features called Paged Media
- Our challenge Can we make it viable for Molina? It should work but.. We found everyone liked the idea but nobody integrated the entire workflow together. It’s the future but we have not tried it yet.
- So our VP of Content Management approve a small budget to perform a proof of concept. The questions we wanted to answer: Can CSS meet our print layout needs? Can we integrate CSS into our CCMS workflow? Is CSS a viable style sheet language for Molina?
- Opportunity CSS programmers have lower rates CSS is an easier language Existing CSS resources and easy to hire
- CSS and XSL-FO are more alike than different XML syntax vs. CSS C-like syntax Don’t think it’s going anywhere soon…
- PDF output from DITA files using CSS for styling Layout must match regulated specification Support XSL-FO and CSS Integrate with CCMS Keep web developers happy
- https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-css/tree/master/com.oxygenxml.pdf.css Applies CSS to DITA XML produced by OT PDF transform CSS formatting acts on the XML User adjusts CSS for PDF changes But not useful for us
- You might say they were scared of XML Strange CSS techniques to access DITA class attributes in XML (and why?) No built-in handling for DITA bulleted lists or numbered lists No DITA table handling
- You might say they were scared of XML
- Devs were happy again
- Good!
- Our challenge Can we make it viable for Molina? It should work but.. We found everyone liked the idea but nobody integrated the entire workflow together. It’s the future but we have not tried it yet.
- I didn’t have any doubt but some reassurance was needed Only AH supports XSL-FO and CSS No CCMS customers were using CSS for PDF Antenna House PDF formatter supports it with upgrade (also Prince, PDFReactor, other?) SDL LCA integration was simple Test of a basic OT plugin with our system worked fine
- Regular CSS: Fonts, colors, line spacing, tables, etc. etc. CSS Paged Media: Basic page layout Page size, margins, columns, etc. Headers and footers Automatic page numbers TOC generation (later)
- Automate TOCs and other items We hope to influence regulatory agencies to modernize their Word-centric workflows Web output from source DITA files Same CSS resources as for PDF can be used Translation to 10 languages
- For organizations who have straightforward print layout needs and are frustrated with the high cost and complexity of the XLS FO formatting language, CSS is a viable alternative to the XSL-FO language. For Molina the CSS language reduces our development time to market, reduces our software development budget and simplifies the human resource planning. A side benefit is that we can utilize the same resource to develop the website channel CSS stylesheet.
- 1. There is a nice backstory to the CSS for Print main story. 2. Before we developed our own stylesheets in CSS, our IT department was not 100% engaged and did not have a share a common understanding of the system, the complexity, and the potential benefits for both our members and Molina. 3. After we started developing CSS stylesheets in-house, the IT is excited about DITA. They understand the DITA-OT capabilities, they understand how the 508 tags are simplified in DITA, they can see the potential benefits of adding HTML content on our website vs. the outdated PDF format. So for Molina DITA tribe has expanded to more people in the organization and the buzz is getting louder.