Although XMetaL docs do a good job explaining the application, and how it works with DITA, they don't provide any "how to" information for new users that need to alter the appearance of their docs to accommodate their company's standards. So, I got a preliminary doc from XMetaL, "Customizing DITA PDF Output."

Although I had to burn a Support credit, the doc has been very helpful. However, I cannot get the output I expect. I decided to start with a simple change to the title page, according to the
instructions in their doc.

Working in Program Files\Common Files\XMetaL Shared\DITA_OT\demo\fo\Customization:

- I placed the attribute changes in \fo\attrs\custom.xsl. I changed the title color to green and made the font larger, as in their example.
- I made margin changes in \fo\layout-masters.xml. I just changed the margins on the first page from 20mm to 25.4mm.
- I removed the comment tags for these two files from catalog.xml.

In XMetaL, I opened a small doc I created, and then selected "Generate Output for DITA Map. I opened the generated PDF and nothing changed. It remains in the default XMetaL format.

Anyone got any ideas? Should catalog.xml be pointing to the customization directory instead of the cfg directory? The instructions just say to remove the comment tags (!-- and --).

Does anyone know of a good resource for customizing XMetaL output?

Thanks very much.