wrapping DITA steps in tables

[Jang F.M. Graat]

Hi Rebecca,

As you need to produce PDFs, you do need the result of the transformation in FM. Changing the EDD is not an options, as that would take you out of the DITA standard (and changing the DITA EDDs in FM is almost impossible to start with - I tried and it really is horrible).

Using scripts in FM to change the DITA steps into table rows has the same problem, as it will invalidate your DITA sources. You could do this but you would have to completely convert the task into a reference topic. That is a major difficulty and should be avoided as well.

This leaves you with one possible scenario: do the transform using XSL when preparing the materials for output to PDF. You can use the standard read-write rules in FM to write the DITA files to XML and read them back. Then add an XSL transform to the import from DITA XML which transforms the steps into table rows. This will leave you with non-standard XML looking like DITA, but as this material is only created to produce a PDF and not for further editing you should be OK.

Note that this transformation has to be done after all other steps in processing the DITA materials (i.e. resolving conrefs and links etc.). It should be the last step before producing the PDF, as the materials will not be valid DITA anymore when the XSL transform was done.

If you have any questions or need help in getting this to work, drop me an e-mail.

Kind regards

Jang