Topic publishing and XREFs

Hi! I'm using xref to link another topic to the existing one; I use DITAOT to publish these topics using two ways: the first is to include both topics into the ditamap; the second is just to publish the first topic. The produced result is different: the link to the second topic is clickable and leads to the second topic included into the pdf as an internal element when a ditamap is used. But if I use just a topic for publishing the second topic is not included into the result pdf as an internal element.

The question is - is it possible at all to include the xrefed topic into the result pdf without ditamap usage? Or is the only way to implement is to use a ditamap?

Thanks, Alex

Hi,

Not sure about how this is handled by the PDF transformation but make sure that the "scope" attribute on your xref element is set to "local".

The spec says:

The processing default is local. If no value is specified, but the attribute is specified on an ancestor within a map or within the related-links section, the value will inherit from the closest ancestor.

However, whereas this does not seem to be a problem when generating HTML, I think that when generating PDF the transformer does not know where to put the linked topic in the document. May be you will have to include it in the map anyway, in some kind of appendix.

Claude

http://vedovini.net/

Hi Claude,

Yes, the scope is set to local - and I'm trying to avoid using maps; just topics. But I'm starting to think that this is impossible... Is it???

Alex

Yes, as I said before, I think that if you don't use a map then DITA2PDF does not know where to put the linked topic in your document

You probably cannot escape maps :)

http://vedovini.net/

XML.org Focus Areas: BPEL | DITA | ebXML | IDtrust | OpenDocument | SAML | UBL | UDDI
OASIS sites: OASIS | Cover Pages | XML.org | AMQP | CGM Open | eGov | Emergency | IDtrust | LegalXML | Open CSA | OSLC | WS-I