Archive - May 2006

Date

Ant refactoring

Issue owner:
Don Day <dond at us dot ibm dot com>

Statement of problem or objective:

Is this architecture, function, fix, or other?

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Boulder-Denver DITA User Group

As of November 2007, the Boulder-Denver DITA User Group is on hold until further notice. If you are interested in facilitating this group, contact julie.baldwin@sybase.com.
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Past presentations:

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Fully enable the XML catalog resolver

Note: This item was included in a version of the DITA-OT and is no longer under discussion. Up to date information on the toolkit can be found here: The DITA Open Toolkit

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Externalized dependencies

Comment on incremental builds

Principles:

  • Retain as much of the formatted output as possible from build to build.
  • Maintain an individual build stream for each topic from souce to output. Where merge is necessary as during book processing, defer merge as late as possible.
  • Save every stage of the build stream as an intermediate file so that the build can rebuild as late in the build stream as possible.
  • Separate the aspects of building a topic that are specific to each map. Also separate the aspect of building a topic that is independent of any map.
  • Defer conditional processing as late as possible to minimize rework prior to filtering.
  • Use timestamps and deltas to determine when to rebuild.

While a full rebuild with these principles will take longer, an incremental rebuild should take much less time. For instance, moving conditional processing as late as possible means that we might process files that don't need to be processed for a specific build target. If we are building multiple targets, however, there is a considerable savings to building the file once.

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irondog1970

Just getting started

I attended the STC conference in Las Vegas last week. It was the first time I ever heard the term DITA. One of the seminars I sat in had a presentation on how using DITA aided in their translation work. At first, I was willing to dismiss DITA as nothing more than an attempt to standardize the methods of writing well. Now, I'm not so sure.

I'm downloading the Priestley Windows Media file, and I'm going to schedule use of the video projector for this Friday to watch it. I'm hoping that with it and the book I'm requesting to be purchased will be a good start to learning what DITA is and how we can use it. As I explained to Kay Ethier yesterday:

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