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1-Visitor
February 9, 2011
Question

Learning about DITA

  • February 9, 2011
  • 6 replies
  • 1775 views
Hi John et al.
We have DITA workshops coming up, including one advertised now on the
publishing process. Check the training website at

    6 replies

    1-Visitor
    February 9, 2011
    I just tried the SMA tutorial and the Print Engine is complaining it can't find any of the sub-docs that are on my C: drive. Anyone have a quick fix on that? Already blown an hour looking around. Reminds me of trying to use the Army's stylesheets that strip out graphics paths which confused PE and they'd almost all get lost.

    And how about the Outline View it shows in the tutorial? I've got Document Map on which looks close but does not show the file names like the Tutorial PDF says Outline View does.

    I've got 5.4 M040 installed.

    Thanks,

    John T. Jarrett CDT
    Senior Tech Writer, Integrated Logistics Support, Land & Armaments/Global Tactical Systems
    18-Opal
    February 9, 2011
    Hi John-



    Check your href's to make sure they are relative and not absolute. If
    your topicref href's are of the form
    "C:\some_local_path\documents\foo.dita", that could be the source of
    your trouble. If you find that's the case, probably the easiest solution
    would be to use a text editor to do a search/replace on the absolute
    part of the path and replace it with the corresponding relative path.



    As for the outline view, from the menus select View->Column View. If you
    only see the tree part of the view, look for a little double-arrow ">>"
    at the right edge of the "Outline" header. Click that and it will expand
    the attribute columns so you can see them.



    --Clay


    1-Visitor
    February 9, 2011
    Well, hrefs don't have any path info...maybe I'll try adding a little bit at a time - hadn't thought of that.

    View doesn't have Column View; there are no >> arrows...BUT (and I'm not sure why SMA turns it off by default) turning gentext back on got the doc map view to add the chapter title ( [] chapter ....Engine Tune Up) which really helps.

    Thanks again - that got that half working. Maybe 5.4 just doesn't have outline view?

    John T. Jarrett CDT
    Senior Tech Writer, Integrated Logistics Support, Land & Armaments/Global Tactical Systems

    T 832.673.2147 | M 832.363.7234 | F 832.673.2376 | x1147 | -<">mailto:->
    BAE Systems, 5000 I-10 West, Sealy, Texas USA 77474
    www.baesystems.com
    18-Opal
    February 9, 2011
    Hi John-



    What M release of 5.4 are you running? They made significant changes to
    the DITA and SMA apps between 5.4 M020 and M030 (if I remember
    correctly, I might be off by 10). I'm running 5.4 M050 and when I create
    a new SMA map file I definitely see the Column view option in the View
    menu.



    Can you select Edit->Edit resolved document->For Styling? What happens
    when you do? Do your topics get imported correctly?



    Also, it might be worth checking the configurations of your machine and
    PE. From the menus choose Tools->Administrative tools->Compare Config
    with PE. Does it indicate any discrepancies?



    --Clay


    1-Visitor
    February 9, 2011
    M5040

    Nope, can't Edit Resolved.

    Differences between PE:

    It is M080 (which might be why SMA won't work for me from there - have to use local copy)

    Hmmm, says both DITAs are M030 and SMAs are F000 but points out the builds are different M040 vs M080 and M010 vs M080 respectively). I'll try upgrading my client machine to match...

    John T. Jarrett CDT
    Senior Tech Writer, Integrated Logistics Support, Land & Armaments/Global Tactical Systems

    T 832.673.2147 | M 832.363.7234 | F 832.673.2376 | x1147 | -<">mailto:->
    BAE Systems, 5000 I-10 West, Sealy, Texas USA 77474
    www.baesystems.com
    18-Opal
    February 9, 2011
    That may help, especially if there's something wrong with your current
    installation. I suspect that may be the case, since you don't have the
    column view and you don't have the Edit Resolved option. That makes it
    sound like either you don't have the SMA installed properly, or maybe
    it's just not active in your configuration.



    BTW, you are checking these things with a map file open rather than a
    topic file, correct?



    --Clay