Meeting minutes 2021 07 01
Attendance: Robert Anderson, Radu Coravu, John Pashley, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Frank Wegmann, Eric Sirois, Zoe Lawson, Lief Erickson, Bill Gamboa
Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.6? Quiet month continues...
Discussion about updating DITA 2.0 beta grammar files; we have forked the OASIS repos and build from there, so could add to the plugin registry and people can add it to 3.6 -- means no patch is needed, anyone can update: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita/tags https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-techcomm/tags
Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/27
Roger noticed that in HTML5, order of template calls for the <head> are such that user's custom CSS links come before header file. Have had to override because need custom CSS to come after the header file content, so that it can override the header file content. Wonder if this might be worth switching, Roger has had to flip the order in custom plugins regularly. Seems like best way to approach is likely to open the pull request and discuss there.
Follow-on discussion about CSS, part of the issue above is caused by only allowing a single CSS file on our CSS parameter, should we allow more than one? Ant makes it tricky. Could use builds to merge CSS or copy files but a lot of people don't want to do that. The existing parameters are a confusing group of values that many have trouble getting right, they grew out of a lot of legacy needs. Would be really nice if we could just not touch those, and have a single new parameter that takes a list of CSS files, copies them to the root of the output directory.
Discussion of Jarno's recent PDF work, the theme plugin - can we bundle with OT? If we do so, we could use it to build our own docs to PDF, and our docs could give examples of how to use it (with coderef) to show how to do slight PDF modifications to PDF2 processing. Discussion around formatters ... the generated configuration works with FOP for fonts, but not so much for Antenna House. Could ask them to update but they likely prefer people use PDF5. Same issue with RenderX. Probably OK for an open source tool to put out something that works with FOP, but of course it would be great if the other tools extended to get that support.
Eric asks about dita install code that does not work the same cross platform. Really prefer to use URIs, which then requires proper escaping of things like spaces. Also note that we probably need better tests around this before changing it. Eric will do some testing, the issue is that the generated properties file uses platform-specific slashes, so plugin.properties uses \ characters; then if you zip up the toolkit, it can't run on mac/linux. Think that using / will work on all three. Report is at:
https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3759
No major updates...
Vendor webinar was held mid-June; some discussion of migration in progress. Oxygen 24 will have some refactoring stylesheets. Changes doctype, rename elements, try to update to latest. Also had a request for flexible simple tables, and someone who wanted to drop support for copy-to.
Discussion of copy-to ... no implementation yet, and DITA-OT will have to do it with new modules. Today we use SAX which works because the copy-to info is on the same element being processed, but with 2.0 it will have to come from a nested element, which means SAX streaming can't see it. If we could do some sort of reverse-cascade ahead of time -- interpret the file name and move it up to copy-to internally -- then we might more easily use the same node.
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Project boards: Project boards: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/
Time to go through pull requests, issues tracker, determine how to handle open issues.
View the latest DITA Open Toolkit docs at www.dita-ot.org/dev.