Project plan

The project skeleton need to cover the following areas:

• Anatomy of the build process: build file semantics, related Ant parameters, customizing build files w.r.t. transformation and output generation, the typical sequence of processes launched during the build of both XHTML and PDF outputs, and the most common processing errors.
• A glossary listing and describing the Toolkit files involved in the build process and related to the transformation, styling, and customization of XHTML and PDF outputs. The following processing related file types are included:
  • build*.xml
  • category*.xml
  • integrator*.xml
  and the following transformation and styling file types are included:
  • CSS (*.css); used to style XHTML output
  • XSLT (*.xsl); used to generate either XHTML or XSL-FO
  The glossary links XSLT file entries to their respective detailed documentation generated by oXygen® using the menu option Tools > Generate Documentation > XSLT Stylesheet Documentation. The documentation describes the function of the referenced files and the templates within the respective XSL file. The possibility to generate each stylesheet documentation into multiple HTML files, instead of one large file, will be examined. The purpose is to link to specific template documentation from within the description of customization methods.
• Methods of customzing XHTML, including:
  • Using own CSS files instead of the default ones, which ship with the Toolkit
  • Modifying CSS by creating additional sheets and adding appropriate properties to the Ant build script to associate the modified files with the XHTML output
  • Adding parameters to the Ant build file to specify headers & footers
  • Overriding the default Toolkit XSLT processing (modifying and replacing original XSLT files). If this methodology is to be adopted, it is specially important to be able to link to XSLT files template documentation at the best possible granularity.
• Methods of customizing PDF, including:
  • Overriding the Idiom plugin FO XSL Stylesheet processing, as described in ./demo/fo/Customization/README.txt
  • Modifying XSLT transformations
  • Modifying the Idiom plugin master page layouts
  • Editing the vars file (e.g. ./DITA-OT1.5.1/demo/fo/cfg/common/vars/en_US.xml)