Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Mica Semrick]

Hi list,

I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most helpful!

Best,
Mica
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Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Hans Hagen]

On 5/22/2014 7:11 PM, Mica Semrick wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most helpful!

I must admit that I've never heard of DITA XML. Concerning FO ... I once 
made something for mkii, and I think I must have some first code for 
mkiv but never saw a good reason for finishing that (shouldn't be too 
hard) especially because in practice it's often easier to directly write 
an xml mapping and then use the mechanisms that context has available 
for getting a better output.

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                              | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Mica Semrick]

Hi Hans,

Thanks for your reply. I found my way to foxet, but never got it working. I've written several mapping files for XML with good results, but DITA is a bit of a different beast. 

DITA is geared towards technical writing, and its main features are defined content types, a mechanism for controlled reuse below the file level, a modular structure, and built in extensibility of its XML vocabulary. It comes with its own toolkit that filters out and pulls in content and it uses FOP to produce PDF (hence my mention of FO). Since the toolkit must process the XML to resolve linked content and remove content, it is not recommended to directly typeset the XML like you could do with DocBook. I see a few ways to achieve what I want, which is a PDF produced my ConTeXt: target a merged XML file that the dita toolkit has produced, produce a concatenated HTML file and typeset that, or typeset the fo file before FOP gets to it. Of those approaches, the first seems like the best idea,
  but I wanted to query the list before proceeding.

Thanks for your time.

Best,
Mica
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Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Hans Hagen]

On 5/23/2014 1:30 AM, Mica Semrick wrote:
> Hi Hans,
>
> Thanks for your reply. I found my way to foxet, but never got it working. I've written several mapping files for XML with good results, but DITA is a bit of a different beast.

that's mkii and will not work in mkiv

> DITA is geared towards technical writing, and its main features are defined content types, a mechanism for controlled reuse below the file level, a modular structure, and built in extensibility of its XML vocabulary. It comes with its own toolkit that filters out and pulls in content and it uses FOP to produce PDF (hence my mention of FO). Since the toolkit must process the XML to resolve linked content and remove content, it is not recommended to directly typeset the XML like you could do with DocBook. I see a few ways to achieve what I want, which is a PDF produced my ConTeXt: target a merged XML file that the dita toolkit has produced, produce a concatenated HTML file and typeset that, or typeset the fo file before FOP gets to it. Of those approaches, the first seems like the best ide
 a, but I wanted to query the list before proceeding.

best just skip to fop stage and directly map the html (or whatever 
intermediate format) then ... the more info gets lost, the worse the 
result will look as the typesetting engine works better on abstractions 
(chapters and so) then on boxes pasted together

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                              | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Jan Tosovsky]

On 2014-05-22 Mica Semrick wrote:
> 
> I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML
> and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If
> you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most
> helpful!

What is your real use case? A typical XML based workflow involves XSL-FO ->
PDF route using FO processor (Antenna House, XEP, FOP etc). 

Anyway, there are several ways. If you are not locked to DITA yet, I would
strongly recommend switching to DocBook instead :-) You get similar single
source solution with the semantically rich vocabulary that allows you to
produce all typical outputs. Moreover, there is a special project dedicated
to DocBook to ConTeXt conversion 'dbcontext'
http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/releases/download.html although I had to
tweak it for my recent project to ensure compatibility with current ConTeXt
version (MkIV).

This XSLT way is most natural for XML processing, but I understand that
writing XSLT transformation is discouraging for many people.

Regards, Jan






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___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Hans Hagen]

On 5/23/2014 7:39 PM, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> On 2014-05-22 Mica Semrick wrote:
>>
>> I've been contemplating making a ConTeXt output or parser for DITA XML
>> and was wondering if anyone has worked with DITA and ConTeXt before? If
>> you have and could offer any advice and/code, that would be most
>> helpful!
>
> What is your real use case? A typical XML based workflow involves XSL-FO ->
> PDF route using FO processor (Antenna House, XEP, FOP etc).

Which makes all our workflows here non typical -) I never use an FO 
processor. The xml handler in mkiv is quite efficient and fast.

> Anyway, there are several ways. If you are not locked to DITA yet, I would
> strongly recommend switching to DocBook instead :-) You get similar single
> source solution with the semantically rich vocabulary that allows you to
> produce all typical outputs. Moreover, there is a special project dedicated
> to DocBook to ConTeXt conversion 'dbcontext'
> http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/releases/download.html although I had to
> tweak it for my recent project to ensure compatibility with current ConTeXt
> version (MkIV).

> This XSLT way is most natural for XML processing, but I understand that
> writing XSLT transformation is discouraging for many people.

it depends ... context mkiv can load an xml tree and you can use path 
expressions similar to what xslt does but saving the intermediate step

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                              | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Mica Semrick]

Hi Jan,

>What is your real use case? A typical XML based workflow involves XSL-FO ->
>PDF route using FO processor (Antenna House, XEP, FOP etc).

I'm looking to use DITA to publish a literary journal. The journal will contain contributions from multiple authors. I also want to publish works by single authors. I won't make enough (or any) money to justify the very expensive license for Antenna House or XEP, thus they are not really an option. I find FOP to be really sub par. 

My basic work flow would have to be DITA XML > DITA OpenToolkit (build process) > ??? > ConTeXt > PDF, where ??? could be some Toolkit XML output, XHTML, HTML5, FO.

>Anyway, there are several ways. If you are not locked to DITA yet, I would
>strongly recommend switching to DocBook instead :-) 

The DocBook vocabulary does not fit my needs. TEI is much closer to what I want, but I'm already familiar with DITA. 

>This XSLT way is most natural for XML processing, but I understand that
>writing XSLT transformation is discouraging for many people.

Yes, I'm generally OK with working with XSLT. DITA has a build system, called the DITA OpenToolkit that is build with Ant, a bit of java, and XSLT. You can see the toolkit here: http://dita-ot.github.io/

The Toolkit already supports PDF output via FOP, but as I said, FOP leaves quite a bit to be desired. 

Best,
Mica
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maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
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___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Jan Tosovsky]

Hi Mica,

> I won't make enough (or any) money to justify the very 
> expensive license for Antenna House or XEP, thus they are not
> really an option. I find FOP to be really sub par.

I fully understand. I was exactly in the same situation few months ago and
also found ConTeXt as the only option for my needs. Welcome to the club :-)

> My basic work flow would have to be DITA XML > DITA OpenToolkit (build
> process) > ??? > ConTeXt > PDF, where ??? could be some Toolkit XML
> output, XHTML, HTML5, FO.

In your case I would fork 'dbcontext' stylesheets and adapt them to the DITA
vocabulary (reasonable subset). If the Tooolkit is really 'Open', it
shouldn't be so hard to integrate this new stuff into it. The build process
would simply generate the ConTeXt source file. 

Even forking of something already done means lot of work so I suggested
switching to DocBook instead to reduce this effort significantly.

Regards, Jan


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___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Experience with DITA XML or XSL/FO

[Mica Semrick]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the pointer towards dbcontext. I had previoiusly used dblatex for some tech docs a while back, but never realized there was a ConTeXt version.

Best,
Mica
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If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

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