Author default view settings

[gwhite]

Hi,

I'm evaluating oXygen Author currently and enjoying many of its features. However, a couple of things have me confused that the documentation and, as far I can tell, the UI do not address.

1) I want DITA documents to open by default in show-all-tags view. I do not see a way to effect this in Preferences.

2) I would like to change or eliminate the default text that appears with certain tags. For example, for the prereq tag in a task topic, I want "Pre-requisite" to be spelled without the hyphen, which is the way most U.S. English dictionaries spell it.

Can these things be done?

Gary

[george]

Hi Gary,

You can change the default tags mode from Options->Preferences -- Editor / Edit modes / Author -- Tags, Tags display mode. The default is "Partial Tags", just select "Full Tags" instead of that.

oXygen uses CSS to render the XML element in the visual (Author) editing mode. In the DITA case the "prereq" element is rendered by {oXygen}/frameworks/dita/css_classed/task.css which contains a rule like

Code: Select all

*[class~="task/prereq"]:before{

    content: "Pre-requisites: ";

}

One possibility is to just change that rule.
oXygen supports also alternative CSS stylesheets so you may define such an alternative CSS that imports the default one and overwrites the above rule.

Regards,
George

[gwhite]

George,

Thanks for your reply. A follow-up question. I've done what you've suggested for creating an alternative css file, called task_ndo.css, in which I've included the changes I wanted to be reflected. I've placed it in the same directory with task.css. Now, how do I specify that that file be used in place of task.css?

Gary

[gwhite]

Ooh, wait. Rereading your answer, I think I may have misunderstood. I'm not sure how to cause an alternative css file to import the values of the default. Could you clarify? All I did was make changes to the file and save them under a different name.

Gary

[george]

Hi Gary,

The simplest thing is to edit that file directly - we will also correct that for our next release.

Now, if you want to set an alternative CSS for DITA you can do that from Options->Preferences -- Document Type Association, select DITA, use the Edit button to edit the DITA document type then go to the Author tab and then on the CSS page. There you can see that there are 3 CSS stylesheets specified, one is the default one and two alternate CSSes. You can add your own CSS there. That CSS can import the default one that we provide for DITA and just add the additional rules you want.

Best Regards,
George