Arbortext HTML output?

[ptc-4476688]

Hello,

I work at a manufacturing company and we're interested in user arbortext to manage our documents and publish them to a website for our customers. Another business unit is currently in the process of implementing the software but those of us on the website side are trying to get a jump planning.

I know arbortext is capable of HTML output but can someone explain to me how that content is stored and how it is retrieved? Our documents would have chapters, sections, etc. Each piece of content will also be tagged to a particular model.

Thank you!

[ClayHelberg · Accepted solution]

Hi Kyle--

Arbortext can publish HTML output in a couple of different ways:

1) As one giant HTML file

2) As "chunked" HTML files, where each chapter/section/whatever-you-want is split out as a separate file, and a frameset is included for viewing with navigation controls (TOC, index)

The way the output is formatted depends on your stylesheet. You have a lot of control over the appearance of output, and how it is split into chunks. You can define each chapter to be a chunk, or each section, or any other element from your doctype can be used to define chunks.

You also have some control over where style information is stored. You can specify style information (CSS) to be stored directly on the HTML elements, style information in the HTML document head, or style information in a separate CSS file with references in the HTML documents.

"Tagging" content to specific models would be done using Arbortext's profiling feature. The end user can use this to filter the content that is visible when viewing the output, e.g. "Show the content for model XYZ", which will hide content specific to other models.

--Clay

[ptc-4476688]

Hi Clay,

Thanks for the response, it was very helpful. Is it possible to retrieve only the content (without HTML markup) from the CMS? Perhaps calling a web service to hit the database directly? We'd like to be able to control our own markup and keep it as light as possible at times (for example, in a mobile app)

Thanks!

[ClayHelberg]

Hi Kyle--

The HTML output from Arbortext does not typically go into a separate CMS. The CMS stores your XML source content, and PE generates HTML output to be posted on your website or otherwise distributed to end users.

You do have a fair amount of control over the output markup in the current version of Arbortext. You can define HTML element mapping for each element/context in your source XML (within certain constraints). You can have different stylesheets to generate different "flavors" of HTML output (e.g. one for standard browsers and one for mobile).

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "retrieve only the content"--do you mean just text strings? I suppose you could create an XSLT stylesheet to dump the text from your XML source with no markup, but I'm not sure I see what the value of that would be.

--Clay

[ptc-4476688]

Hi Clay,

That's exactly what I meant: just retrieve text strings from the CMS. We have certain places in our applications that we're hoping to retrofit with the content that'll be generated in arbortext so just "naked" text (no markup) is ideal in some situations. Ideally, everytime the application is loaded we retrieve that information.

Thanks,

Elliott

[crumple]

What are the steps for chunking chapters so that they are outputted as separate html pages?