Hi Chris,

Thank you again for your reply (on the DITA Users List). I haven't had the time to read it in full detail and try out some of the suggestions until now.

• Selecting just the opening tag and pressing Enter will allow you to change the element from one type to another.

How would you select just the opening tag? If I do that in Author mode, the opening and closing tag with everything in between gets selected. When I then press Enter, I can surround the tag with another. In Text mode, the tag gets deleted when I press Enter.

• We have a "Show Page Width" alternative CSS style that helps writers visualize page width, as a guide to table and figure sizing.

Would you mind sharing this style with me?

Thank you.

Best regards,

Frank

Hi Frank,

If you are not using the DITA Perspective in Oxygen, I suggest enabling it:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/25.0/ug-author/topics/dita-perspective.html

It applies a collection of settings that are useful for DITA editing.

Some more random thoughts:

• We also find the tag-based map view in an editing window to be somewhat overwhelming. We primarily edit maps in the following views:
  • DITA Maps Manager - adding and restructuring content
  • Editor window, Text view - fine-timing map attributes or element structures
• Use keyboard shortcuts in the DITA Maps Manager - cursor keys to move around and expand/collapse, and type the names of files to auto-move to that matching file.
• When you select a topic editing window, if a map referencing that topic is open in the DITA Maps Manager, it will scroll to that topic's map entry.
  • This is useful when you have multiple topic editing tabs open and you want to quickly see the map context of each one while editing.
• We bind a Ctrl-` (backtick) hotkey to toggling full tags on/off, which makes it effortless to switch them on and off during editing. This is a huge help!!
  • I can provide details on how to configure this.
• Oxygen has a lot of clever shortcuts for element operations in the editor. For example,
  • Selecting just the opening tag and pressing Enter will allow you to change the element from one type to another.
  • Placing the cursor just after the opening tag and pressing Backspace will unwrap the tag but keep its content.
  • Using Tab/Shift-tab at the beginning of list items can change their list level, including the element structure work needed to make it happen.
• In editing windows, there is an element ancestry shown at the top for the current cursor position. This can be useful, especially when tags are hidden and you want to select some containing element (like an entire <note> element when the cursor is somewhere inside its content).
• We use shared CSS that configures the Oxygen editor, PDF output, and WebHelp output to all share a common style.
  • As we also come from a FrameMaker background, our writers wanted Oxygen's editing window to be as close to the PDF as possible.
  • We have a "Show Page Width" alternative CSS style that helps writers visualize page width, as a guide to table and figure sizing.
• Using Find in Files and XPath/XQuery Builder to quickly find content in your maps can be helpful. Oxygen's search capability is very fast.

Feel free to ask for more details on any aspect of this!

 - Chris