XMetaL and DITA in the Marketing Department: Tastes Great, Less Filling
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© 2010 JustSystems Inc.1 © 2010 JustSystems Inc.
XMetaL and DITA in the Marketing Department
tastes great, less filling
© 2010 JustSystems Inc.2
Publishing product data sheets
• Previously: Word + InDesign
• Cost: $20,000/year
• 9 SKUs x 2 updates/year x $1100/update
• Average turnaround: 5 days
Slow and expensive
Challenge
© 2010 JustSystems Inc.3
• maintain product data sheets using DITA,
XMetaL and SubVersion
• publish data sheets using the DITA Open
Toolkit (DITA OT)
• save money! save time! Yay! we're done!
Solution
© 2010 JustSystems Inc.4
But...
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And…
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• DITA map
• title page
• callouts
• company info
Marking up the document
© 2010 JustSystems Inc.7
• page layouts
• callout text
• company info
• 2-column layout, *most* of the time…
• font treatment
DITA Open Toolkit challenges
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• PDF output has a specific customization
architecture
• catalog file
• XSL template overrides
• XSL attribute sets overrides
• Fonts, background images
• Locale files for multi-language support
DITA OT Anatomy
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• title page
• inner pages
• last page
Configured via
layout-masters.xml
Page layouts
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• XSL:FO does not support background images
on the page level
• use CSS sprites technique on page regions
• 1 background image per page-master
• Bonus: Marketing can tweak the design without
using XSL
NB: no gaps between page regions!
FO sprites are your friend
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• Override main topic
template
• create fo:markers from
title, abstract
• Display markers in the
region-before (header)
Title, tagline, summary
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• <lq>, <cite> elements
mark up the callout
• Override default
template to create an
fo:marker
• Display marker
contents in the region-
start
Callout text
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• Default layout is 2-
column
• Tables need to be in a
1-column layout
• Makes use of XEP’s
@span extension
• To use @span, must
be a child of the flow
2-column to 1-column layout
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• A topic in the DITA map
• Use of @outputclass
• Override default
processing to create an
fo:marker
• Display marker contents
in the start region
Company Info
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• Goal: make use of standard Windows fonts
• xsl:fo attribute-sets are similar to CSS
• Make use of:
– font-family, font-style, font-variant
– font-size, font-weight,
– font-stretch, letter-spacing
Fonts
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Let’s compare…
~~
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• simple markup to start, specialize later
• use xsl:fo sprites; no slicing, users can update
design tweaks
• use page regions, fo:markers to address layout
challenges
• @span support in XEP allows (limited) column-
switching
Takeaways
© 2010 JustSystems Inc.18
• Marketing can self-publish in minutes vs. days
• Cost: 3 days XSL development + 1 day content
migration
• 100% ROI if updates are 4x more frequent than
design changes
Next steps:
• 6 of the SKUs in XMetaL, rest to come
• More re-use across SKUs
• A4 variant for EMEA
Summary