Quick way to validate DITA specializations

[Gorly]

Hi guys,

is there any way to quickly validate a DITA specialization against standard DITA resulting in a list of what had been specialized?

I'm necromancing a long dead legacy document here, that had been written in some DITA specialization.

Problem is, nobody remembers about there wheres' and whats' of the document (my boss even barely remembered that there had been "something").

For now I managed to save it as XML, but the error logs went crazy while doing so

The only person who might have had an idea about the case left the company years ago, too.

The issue at hand is, that the document needs to be imported into some CMS with DITA import filters - and I need to know at least where problems may occur.

As I have literally no time and budget for this, I need some quick and dirty solution

Maybe you guys have some bright idea.

-Alex

[ScottPrentice]

Hi Alex...

I'm assuming that this is not a DITA (XML) file but a structured FM file that has a custom DITA EDD applied? How about this ..

First, open the file and choose Export Element Catalog to EDD, then with the exported EDD, choose Save As DTD. This will give you a DTD of the "specialized" model. Then do the same with a "standard" DITA topic, so you get a DTD form the standard model. Use a Diff tool to compare the two.

The Export as EDD should generate the element definitions in alpha order, so your Diff process should be reasonably useful. Of course, this will depend on the topic mode that the custom file was specialized from. You'll want to keep that in mind when creating the "standard" file to use as the base.

Might work.

Cheers,

…scott

[Gorly]

Hi Scott,

thanks for the idea - that might indeed have worked.

But just some time ago my customer scrapped even the work I invested so far ("this is far too detailed, we don't need it that detailed").

So - now where has that "Helpful answer" button gone?

[ScottPrentice · Accepted solution]

Cool. That's even easier!

Good luck!