how to handle DITA <ph> xrefs

Hi Niels...

It sounds like you need to create a ph element definition in your EDD. If you have defined a ph element, you can add it to your general rule. To create an element definition in your EDD, just insert an <Element> node in your EDD. You should see other nodes like this .. you just need one for the ph element. You'll also need to add attribute definitions to that element definition.

The best thing for you to do is to look at the DITA structure applications that ship with FrameMaker. If I may be so bold to ask .. why are you creating a DITA structure application when those are provided for you? If you want to create a custom DITA app, you should start with a default app and modify it, but there's seldom reason to start from scratch in creating a DITA app.

A note of warning .. the DITA 1.2 apps are horribly complex to understand. They were created to mirror the way the DITA DTDs are structured which is a series of nested/referenced MOD and ENT files. The EDDs provided by Adobe use text insets to emulate this structure. While technically, an interesting and possibly sensible idea, it's a mess when you're trying to customize. If you're just trying to do some basic DITA work, you're better off using the DITA 1.1 apps in which each EDD is completely self contained and much easier to work with. The only problem with the default DITA 1.1 apps is that there is one per topic type, which means that you have to make duplicate edits in each topic type you plan on working with.

There's no reason that you can't have one structure application that supposts all (well, most) of the topic types. This is what DITA-FMx does. Even if you don't want to use DITA-FMx for authoring and publishing DITA in Frame, you might want to download the trial and take a look at the EDD.

     http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

...scott

Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com