Font style issues in DITA

Hi Harsha...

You can't use standard paragraph and character styling in an XML file .. that information is lost when you save/repoen the file (as you've noticed). You need to set up your EDD so it applies the necessary formatting from the template based on elements and attributes.

If you want to change the formatting of a standard <p> element, you'd set the @outputclass attribute to some value (like "boldpara") .. then in the EDD, you'd modify the context rules for the <p> element definition so it tests for the value of @outputclass and assigns the needed para tag instead of the default para tag.

If you're trying to assign inline formatting, you'd use one of the inline elements (<ph> if nothing else works better, but there's always <b> and <i> for bold and italic). If the standard formatting for one of these inline elements doesn't do what you want, you'd use the same process as described above. Set the @outputclass attribute value of the inline element to something meaningful, then modify the element definition in the EDD to apply the proper formatting.

Remember to import the EDD into the template after updating.

Remember that DITA is all about semantic tagging, so if possible, it's best to use one of the semantic tags (like <uicontrol> or <wintitle>) for inline tagging. You're free to modify the actual formatting that's applied by those elements in the EDD and template, so rather than making up a bunch of special @outputclass settings that you have to manually apply, you might see if the default elements will support your model.

Cheers,

...scott