Hi Radu Thank for your detailed comments. Fair enough, I fully understand that there have to be enough users who request this feature before you invest the resources to implement this. Kind regards Yves On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 14:49, Oxygen XML Editor Support (Radu Coravu) < support@oxygenxml.com> wrote:
Hi Yves,
Coming back to your request:
Track changes automatically, i.e. without having to change the @rev attribute manually
Honestly I don't think that's a good idea. Looking at how many changes our technical documentation writer does between releases, how many spell check errors he fixes, how much content he reuses, how much phrasing of existing paragraphs he changes, some of the changes the technical writer does should not appear as revisions because they are small bug fixes in the existing DITA content. So having the application mark as revisions every DITA element in which changes have been done will generate in the end a very large list of revisions, a list which will be overwhelming to read by anyone. Also if I change a single character in a paragraph (a spell check) that entire paragraph which may span half a page will be marked as a revision.
To whom is this revision list destined? Is it for the end user (like a list of new features) or is it for an internal reviewer? If the list is for the end user maybe it should be manually created because the end user does not need to know that a certain paragraph was re-written to improve its readability. If the list is for an internal reviewer, maybe the tech writers should use change tracking instead because change tracking and comments already can be made to appear in the published output.
The problem with adding new functionality to Oxygen is making sure that functionality covers as many similar use cases as possible. If I only cover a company's use case but my support for revisions is not generic enough to cover the use cases of other companies, then it's not worth implementing it. So ideally I would need to be in direct contact with two or more companies requiring this and understand if we can build a solution which would satisfy lots of various company-specific needs. Because in the end, if the revision-related improvements are kind of company-specific it's not worth in investing resources to add the improvements in Oxygen. In a way this is why Oxygen has API, this is why we have support for plugins, for custom validation and why the publishing can be customized, in order to cover company specific requirements with company specific customizations made by a company which could have a separate contract with that company based on providing this service.
Regards, Radu
Radu Coravu <oXygen/> XML Editor http://www.oxygenxml.com
On 7/8/2019 2:52 PM, Yves Barbion wrote:
Thank you for your reply, Radu.
So I understand that some custom development work would need to be done, using the various technologies (oXygen plugin, CSS, XSLT...). We are getting requests like these quite regularly from our oXygen customers, so I think it would be very nice to have this as a standard feature in one of the next releases of oXygen XML Author/Editor.
Kind regards
Yves
On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 09:38, Oxygen XML Editor Support (Radu Coravu) <support@oxygenxml.com <mailto:support@oxygenxml.com>> wrote:
Hi Yves,
I see no one else answered this on the Oxygen Users List.
I'm linking to the similar thread you started on the DITA Users List:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dita-users/conversations/topics/44837
My answers for your questions would be:
> Track changes automatically, i.e. without having to change the @rev attribute manually
By "track changes" you mean automatically setting the @rev attribute
on
modified elements. And this can be done with a custom Oxygen plugin.
> Indicate the changed paragraphs with change bars in the PDF (using Miramo)
Using our DITA + CSS = PDF plugin this could quite easily be done,
add
some CSS selectors which add borders for elements containing the @rev attribute.
> Generate a list of revisions
You would need some kind of custom XSLT processing going through all topics and creating maybe a DITA topic containing links to all
changed
topics.
Regards, Radu
Radu Coravu <oXygen/> XML Editor http://www.oxygenxml.com
On 7/4/2019 10:57 AM, Yves Barbion wrote: > Hi group > > I'm using oXygen XML Editor version 21 to author DITA-structured content > and I was wondering how to manage revisions. This is what I'd like to do: > > * Track changes automatically, i.e. without having to change the @rev > attribute manually > * Indicate the changed paragraphs with change bars in the PDF
(using
> Miramo) > * Generate a list of revisions > > I'm not using a CCMS or a version management system at this moment. > > Any ideas? > > Thanks > > Yves > > > _______________________________________________ > oXygen-user mailing list > oXygen-user@oxygenxml.com <mailto:oXygen-user@oxygenxml.com> > https://www.oxygenxml.com/mailman/listinfo/oxygen-user > _______________________________________________ oXygen-user mailing list oXygen-user@oxygenxml.com <mailto:oXygen-user@oxygenxml.com> https://www.oxygenxml.com/mailman/listinfo/oxygen-user
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