Configuring PDF Output for DITA with a Point-And-Click Interface
Back in 2006, I was involved in a DITA project that included a quite extensive customization of the DITA Open Toolkit for the PDF output. Since I was the only one in the team who knew XSLT and wasn’t getting a panic attack immediately after looking at the bunch of DITA OT’s stylesheets, the entire customization part fell on my shoulders.
It was 2006, so we didn’t have any books or well-documented reference guides that would give me a clear idea where I was supposed to start. And it was so far from the amazing experience that I’ve gained in a previous project when I was customizing DocBook’s stylesheets being armed with the wonderful Bob Stayton’s DocBook guide!
Fast forward to the successful completion of the project, I’ve figured out how DITA OT works and which parts of the XSL code should be tweaked to change the appearance of the elements I needed. But still, customization of the DITA OT never was an task I enjoyed. When I started my own consultancy business and then established Intuillion, I could perfectly understand why so many documentation teams were concerned about complexity of the PDF output configuration for their DITA content. MS Word was not perfect, but at least they didn’t have to learn XSL or hire an XSL programmer to add a logo to the header.
So can you imagine my excitement when I learned about a visual designer for the DITA’s PDF output called MiramoPDF? Instead of tweaking the XSL code, you just use an intuitive user interface to set up the layout and formatting. Almost a decade ago, I saw a demo of a similar visual designer from one of the leading vendors, but the cost was around $70K, which was restrictive for too many companies. MiramoPDF is nothing like that. It’s easy to-use, it’s affordable, and it will save you tons of money and time.
I didn’t think twice when I was suggested to integrate MiramoPDF into DITAToo DITA CMS. Now you can set up a publishing template using the Miramo visual designer and then use this template to generate a PDF directly from DITAToo.
Here’s a short video (less than 8 minutes) that shows what it looks like to create a publishing template without writing a single line of XSL code:
Retired. Studying Torah and music
6yI have just reproduced our corporate look-and-feel in a detailed Miramo template. Results are superb. It takes some trial and error to learn how to use Miramo, but I have it down now and it is a great tool. It has a few bugs and a few limitations (the new version has solved many of these), but it is all-in-all a great tool . What took my former employer a large staff working for months to achieve (developing a corporate stylesheet for PDF output for DITA XML documentation) took me about 20 hours. Unlike a Microsoft Word or a FrameMaker template, once you have the Miramo PDF Transform, it formats everything you publish in PDF, including legacy documents.