Amber Swope on Bookmaps
Amber Swope, formerly of IBM Rational Software and now Principal Consultant at Justsystems for XMetaL, addressed a dinner meeting of the Boston DITA Users Group Tuesday evening at JoAnn Hackos' Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2007 Conference.
She walked us through the new Bookmaps specification that is part of DITA 1.1 specification, now under review at http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/langspec/ditaref-type.html.
Section 21 (on Bookmap elements) and 22 (on Bookmap metadata) describe a specialization of the Map information type that will support automatic processing of DITA files into printed book output, via PDF. Surprisingly, it does not support book covers.
Originally, IBM designed DITA primarily for the online documentation that was replacing traditional long printed user manuals. The DITA 1.0 Map doesn’t provide the mechanisms for easily producing PDF output, such as controlling where to put the TOC. The Bookmap specialization supports content elements, including Front Matter (TOC, Figure and Tables lists, Dedication, Notices, Preface, and Colophon), Content Proper (including new Parts and Chapters), and Back Matter (Index, Glossary, Notices, Appendices).
She described Bookmap elements that can point to content (like preface, dedication, chapter, part) and elements that can generate content (like toc, figurelist, tablelist, and glossarylist).
She noted that you can have a master Map for the Book and a separate master Map for Help, for example. These master Maps in turn will point to Maps for Chapters, etc. However, with conditional processing or filtering, you can generate both PDF and online help output from a Bookmap.
Metadata elements specify info about the book not considered content (like the classic Dublin Core items - ISBN, publisherinformation, year, etc.)
A major automation feature will be the alphabetization of structures like the glossaries and indexes into multiple languages. This functionality will be supported in future versions of the DITA Open Toolkit. At present, this is a very costly step for localization projects.
The goal of the Open Toolkit development team is to have full support for Bookmaps as soon as the DITA 1.1 standard is approved (expected in May).
DITA tools developers will then rush to include support (some vendors already have beta support), but realistically it may be a few months more before the leading tools have full Bookmap support.
[A PDF of Amber's slides is attached. Please note that this presentation was given BEFORE the DITA 1.1 spec has been approved and will require updates after the OT updates. - Bob Doyle.]
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| bookmap.pdf | 116.83 KB |
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On DITA's original design
IBM has been using DITA for both print and online from the beginning - we were embedding the maps in our legacy SGML book-oriented format to get full-featured print output. That solution wasn't particularly useful to anyone outside IBM, which is why bookmap was needed - just wanted to correct the historical record as far as design inputs go. DITA was not designed for online-only information, it was designed for topics and single-sourcing.
Michael Priestley