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Publishing DITA content through DITA-OT or Save as PDF?

Forum|Forum|11 years ago
August 8, 2014
1 reply
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Hi Frame users and DITA enthusiasts

I would like to ask for your opinions when publishing DITA content to PDF, either with DITA-OT or Adobe PDF.

This is my first DITA Project and I been testing and playing around with both options but feeling stuck as I can't decide which option to go with.

Both the DITA-OT or Save as PDF will require some modifications, so I rather do things the hard way, then having to go back and create a new publishing template later.

Thanks and best regards

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Correct answer ScottPrentice

One of the big reasons for using FM for authoring DITA files is to be able to take advantage of its superior page layout and PDF publishing capabilities. Using the OT (and XSL-FO) will produce very generic output .. give it a try, but unless you are skilled in FO development, you'll have a very steep road in taking that route.

You should be able to set up the default FM publishing process fairly easily, and you'll get much nicer output.

If you want to simplify the default FM-based publishing, you may want to take a look at DITA-FMx (a tool I produce) ..

http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/

Cheers,

Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com

ScottPrenticeCorrect answer

Inspiring

One of the big reasons for using FM for authoring DITA files is to be able to take advantage of its superior page layout and PDF publishing capabilities. Using the OT (and XSL-FO) will produce very generic output .. give it a try, but unless you are skilled in FO development, you'll have a very steep road in taking that route.

You should be able to set up the default FM publishing process fairly easily, and you'll get much nicer output.

If you want to simplify the default FM-based publishing, you may want to take a look at DITA-FMx (a tool I produce) ..

http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/

Cheers,

Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com

E

Engineer_technical_writerAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you so much for your answer Scott, I will take a look at the DITA-FMx plug-in.

I agree that the PDF quality is better with Frame, however I like the way DITA-OT automatically creates TOC, and new chapter page with a list of hyperlinks to topics.

I'm a bit unsure how I create a TOC from ditamap or bookmap, do I have to convert to FM book first?

Best regards

ScottPrentice

Inspiring

With DITA-FMx you just add the "toc" and "indexlist" elements to your bookmap (in the frontmatter and backmatter sections). Then set up your "component templates" to build the generated lists. Default FM provides alternate methods for creating generated lists in the book-build process, but that depends on the FM version. Here's a video on the DITA-FMx process for creating a PDF from a dita map ..

http://blog.leximation.com/2010/03/pdf-publishing-with-dita-fmx-1-1/

Cheers,

…scott

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