easyDITA 19.0 Release Details

easyDITA 19.0 includes a new PDF Generator feature and brings some new and exciting enhancements, as well as common bug fixes. Along with enhancements and fixes, we're also excited to release easyDITA Essential , new subscription tiers, and a new PDF Generator.

Release Date

July 17, 2019

easyDITA Essential

easyDITA Essential is the most approachable, full-powered DITA component content management system (CCMS) and authoring tool on the market. Essential is everything small docs teams need to author, manage, and publish DITA content. An Essential subscription is fast, self-serviceable, and incredibly powerful.

The core features included in all easyDITA Essential instances are:

• Fully collaborative DITA editor

• Full DITA support

• PDF generator

• Static Site Generator

• Revision history

easyDITAEssential subscriptionDITA Open ToolkitAssignments & WorkflowseasyDITA oXygen PluginREST API Access

Publishing Interface

We've redesigned our publishing interface to be cleaner, more streamlined, and easier to use. The publishing interface is also now Chrome and Firefox compatible.

Publishing a map is now as simple as three clicks. Click Publish on a file in the file listing, choose a scenario, click Publish.

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Entering a publishing description is optional now, and the publish parameters can be completely configured during the scenario creation process. This means you do not need to set any parameters just prior to publishing, though if you need to adjust one, such as choosing a DITAVAL, you can.

We have also added an Output tab to the resource manager that lists all publications for the selected resource.

You can download the output directly from the listing by clicking the download icon that appears when you hover over the listing.

Or you can select a publish event from the record to see its key assets and information about the publication.

Static Site Generator

All easyDITA subscriptions now come with our new Static Site Generator. With it you can convert your DITA content in to a complete, uploadable static HTML website.

The process is simple:

• Choose a DITA map

• Publish the map to HTML

• Download the HTML package

• Upload the HTML package to your preferred hosting platform

Your web team can use CSS to style the HTML content, or your hosting platform can provide CSS for you.

PDF Generator

Our new PDF generator does not use the DITA Open Toolkit, so you don't need to use XSLT. Instead, it is built on a combination of our DITA-to-HTML processor and a fast PDF publishing engine that uses CSS (cascading style sheets) to generate the PDF output.

From this interface, you can either select a pre-loaded PDF template to start from, or create your own brand new template. Once you choose, easyDITA gives you a side by side editor and viewer. The HTML and CSS editor is on the left, and the PDF viewer is on the right.

The right side viewer can also show you the document's normalized DITA markup, the HTML, and the log files associated with the PDF generation.

If you like the styling for the PDF, you can save that template and use it like you would any other publishing scenario. Simply name the scenario and click Save Scenario and you've enabled the scenario for use.

To make adjustments to the template and see what the PDF output would look like, click Generate PDF . The viewer will update to show the changes you've made to the template.

For more information, see PDF Generator.

Topic Editor

New and enhanced

• You can edit referenced content in place now, no need to open a new browser tab for the source content. Click on the referenced content, click Edit Content, and behold the pop-up for editing the source content. We also highlight the referenced text so you know what to edit.

  
  
  

• While in suggesting mode, actions made from the footer breadcrumbs are now correctly entered as suggestions instead of edits.

• We patched up the default behavior for <xref type="fn"> that are linking to a <fn> so that its default text is the footnote number or the footnote callout attribute. In other words, you link to a footnote and a number will show up.

• We made some performance enhancements for editing topics so the system doesn't get bogged down by complex operations.

• Here's my favorite enhancement. When switching from the WYSIWYG editor the source view, we now maintain and highlight your cursor position in the source editor. I'm excited.

Fixes

• Validation issues in both the map and topic editors were being shown in orange tickmarks instead of red. We've fixed that so there's no confusion between validation issues (in red) and schematron issues (in orange).

• The table editing toolbar was hiding, even if you placed your cursor in a cell. We've fixed that.

• Copying and pasting images works as expected again.

• Validation tickmarks are now removed as soon as you fix a broken linkfixed and behaving as expected.

• We patched up glossary entry fields so the field-values aren't overwriting the field labels.

• Font for codeblocks changed.

• Fixed some handling around <term> elements to correctly handle them with the keyref attribute.

Taxonomy Interface

New and Enhanced

• Taxonomy structures can now be bound to attributes and shown in the Attributes tab, which means you can apply your taxonomy labels to content for conditional processing. Pretty cool.

Review Interface

New and enhanced

• While in suggesting mode, actions made from the footer breadcrumbs are now correctly entered as suggestions instead of edits.