How do I call the Arbortext Publishing Engine from outside the Arbortext Editor

[respey]

I have a need to call the Arbortext Publshing Engine from a .BAT file instead of from an Arbortext Editor session.  I want to be able to send a .ditamap to the Arbortext Publshing engine, specify a style sheet that is on the Publishing Engine, pass a .ditval file to be used for processing, and specifying the location where the resulting PDF should be stored.

I would think that this should be pretty straight forward, but I cannot seem to find any documentation on the process.  Am I missing something?

[GarethOakes]

Calling PE via .bat is not really the way to do this. PE is designed to interact via HTTP requests or SOAP. The reason is that PE runs constantly as a server, so you don't just start it up every time you want a composition performed, it is always running and servicing composition requests.

The easiest way to do this via command line might be to use Arbortext Editor itself as a client (you can pass command line params to Editor). Alternatively you could make an HTTP or SOAP request to PE, which can be done by most standard web services libraries or even a Perl script. That way you could operate from a command line.

I guess it comes down to what you're ultimately trying to achieve, so I don't really know how to advise you what is best.

[respey]

Gareth,

Essentially, I am looking for the easiest way to generate a PDF output from a .ditamap w/out having to open Editor and go through the menu options.  And I will admit to be a bit of a novice in this area. 🙂

We currently have ANT-based build processes that we use to call DITA Open Toolkit to produce our xHTML output for several products at the same time.  I would like to add the ability to produce PDF output to those same build processes.

Actually, using the Editor itself as a client might be the easiest way to go.  I am not looking to do anything fancy; I just want to produce the PDF output using the style sheets that are currently present on PE.  Can you point me to some documentation that might help me move down this path?

[GarethOakes · Accepted solution]

Firstly, try searching these forums for previous posts as I remember this topic has come up a few times in the past. You can probably copy some code from there!

If you want the official documentation, it is called "Arbortext Help Center". Help Center ships with the product and multiple versions of it are also available online at support.ptc.com.

There is a Help Center topic called "Startup commands and options" that lists how you can call Arbortext Editor from command line. I think you will need either -c -C1 or -C2 options at least, to call the required ACL commands. At the bottom of that topic is a list of related links you should read too, including how to batch format/print documents.

One final tip, most of the composition routines on the Editor side are implemented in ACL scripts which you can browse in the "lib" and "packages" folders of the Arbortext program folder.

If you need help with customisation, code or training for Arbortext then there are a network of experienced PTC partners who can help. Our company GPSL (www.gpsl.co) is one of these.

[respey]

Gareth...Thank you for the suggestions.  I will do some investigation into the details. 

[oliverhu]

Hello, respey

I'm now facing the same situation as I could not find any post about how to publish ditamap to pdf programatically. I Have you worked out someting for this?

[oliverhu]

Hello,Gareth.I have searched for this topic in the forum.But I can NOT find any valueable things. 

Could you help find some posts of this?