DITA to RTF - where did my list items go?

[juliea]

Hello

I'm new to DITA, and am just beginning a month's evaluation of Oxygen, so apologies if this is a daft question, but I have searched high and low and failed to find an answer in the Help or online.

Use case
I have a set of DITA topics that I want to output as a Word document (via the RTF transform). This is standard text about the company and its products, and we think that DITA will make it easier to maintain and reuse this content in sales proposals, marketing materials and user documentation. Our Sales people need a Word document that they can take and then customize for specific prospective customers.

Transformation scenario
I'm using a standard transformation scenario of type RTF, with one change to stop parent links appearing in the output (args.hide.parent.link).

The problem
The <ul> and <ol> list items in my DITA source are not correctly formatted in the RTF - no bullet or number. They both end up as Normal style with list format (hanging indent and tab at front), but no number.

When I output the same DITA topics as PDF, the bulleted and numbered lists come through fine.

So is this a transform issue? Or a Word issue? Any suggestions for how to fix this would be welcome. I need the output RTF to be as well-formatted as possible, as I'm not going to spend time reformatting it every time the source DITA gets updated - ideally, all I want to do it apply the correct Word doc template to the output and save a new version of the Word Standard Proposal document.

Thanks for reading.
Julie

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

The list markers are not created correctly in the RTF output, so it is a transform issue. I recommend going the path DITA XML -> ODF -> DOCX instead of DITA XML -> RTF -> DOCX since the quality is higher in the ODF (Open Document Format) output than in the RTF one. You can do that by running the DITA Map ODF transform in Oxygen instead of DITA Map RTF, opening the ODF result (an .odt file) in Microsoft Word and saving it in the Microsoft Word application as a DOCX (.docx) document.


Regards,
Sorin

[juliea]

Wow, speedy reply, thank you.

I did try outputting to odt instead, but the resulting (default) document formatting was so horrible that I was scared off... However, the numbers and bullets at least are there, so perhaps I just need to see what improvements can be made by just applying the right Word template.

Would fixing this in the RTF transform be on your To Do list, then???

Many thanks.

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

I reported the problem to the original project where the DITA RTF transformation is developed and maintained. The developers working on that project will probably fix that in one of their future versions, and we will add that fix in a future version of the Oxygen application.


Regards,
Sorin

[Radu]

Hi,

As an alternative you could try to use the DITA2GO converter:

http://dita2go.com/

from what I've been told it has better support for RTF output than the DITA Open Toolkit bundled with Oxygen.

Regards,
Radu