DITA front matter formatting

[triciaklansky]

In a DITA topic that is front matter, all paras, list items, note, etc. need to be formatted paragraph tags with a smaller font. Is it possible to put this topic in a bookmap/frontmatter element and then assign the paragraph tags based on the frontmatter element? I'm unable to figure out the context rule for this structure.

Or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks for your help.

- Tricia

[ScottPrentice]

Hi Tricia...

I believe that a context rule can reference an element/attribute in a parent book, but not in the parent map. You'll need to somehow set an attribute value in the generated book component that references the frontmatter topic that indicates that it is a "toc" or other frontmatter/booklist element. In DITA-FMx, the XSLT that builds the book from a map adds a "mapelemtype" attribute and sets it to the map element type ("toc" or "indexlist"), so that later processes or context rules can determine which type of "file" this topic is. It's a bit of work to set this up. You might want to take a look at the DITA-FMx 1.1 beta since it provides lots of book-building features like this by default ..

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

Alternatively, you can just import an alternate template into that file after the book has been generated.

Cheers,

...scott

Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com