It’s not necessarily just for the HTML Help format. Our DMP
product also allows for these three designations. However, we currently do it
in an external configuration file, rather than in the map. We also allow for a
fourth topic designation – the topic to be displayed should the Help system
have a “Help” button. In our case, that brings up a topic that’s the entry
point to the online help for actual Help system , though it could also be product
and version information, etc.
Metadata in the map does seem like a reasonable way to approach
these.
Chris
From: ian balanza-davis
[mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 7:50 AM
To: ;
Subject: Re: [dita-help] Default Topic in Help Output
Hi
Tony
From my point of view the ditamap seems to be a good place to start, although
given the nature of the information would storing this as part of the map
metadata be the logical location rather than the specific topicref or
topicrefs?
One further question: HTML help is currently ubiquitous, but by placing
information in the ditamap for a specific output format, are we potentially
reducing the long-term ease by which other formats can be output from the same
ditamap?
Ian
From: Tony Self <>
To:
Sent: Monday, 25 May, 2009 5:51:22
Subject: [dita-help] Default Topic in Help Output
Greetings colleagues
A recent question on the Yahoo! DITA Users list was about how to nominate a
topic other than the first topic as the default page in a CHM output using
the DITA OT. Deborah Pickett provided a workaround solution, which was to
adjust the DITA OT map2hhp.xsl file, and to mark up the topicref of the
default topic in the ditamap with a specific outputclass attribute (eg,
"start-topic").
It occurs to me that this is likely to be a common requirement for all
tri-pane outputs. To support a nominated default topic option without using
this outputclass workaround would require a specification change, I believe.
To be thorough, we would probably need to consider a home topic option as
well; that is, the topic that displays when the Home button in the tri-pane
is pressed. So that would mean there are three "first" or
"top" topics:
. the first topic in the map (and therefore in the TOC tree)
. the first topic displayed when the Help is opened
. the topic that is displayed when Home is selected.
It seems logical that this information should reside in the ditamap. I'm not
sure whether its logical location is as an attribute of the topicref
element, though.
Any thoughts?
Tony Self
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