LwDITA

This repository contains a number of tools and libraries for working with LwDITA (Lightweight DITA):

1. lwdita-xdita A parser and serializer for XDITA (which is the XML representation of LwDITA). This can serialize/deserialize XDITA to an lwdita-ast object tree.
2. lwdita-ast An object representation of the LwDITA conceptual model. This is used by lwdita-xdita.

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Working with XDITA

You can add lwdita-xml library to your project using npm or yarn

npm install --save @evolvedbinary/lwdita-xdita

or

yarn add @evolvedbinary/lwdita-xdita

XDITA Parsing Example

The following example code shows how to parse XDITA to an lwdita-ast object tree.

import { xditaToAst, astToJdita } from "@evolvedbinary/lwdita-xdita/converter";

const xdita = `
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD LIGHTWEIGHT DITA Topic//EN" "lw-topic.dtd">
<topic>...</topic>
`

const abortOnError = true;

xditaToAst(xdita, abortOnError)
  .then(ast => console.log(JSON.stringify(ast.json, null, 2))
  .catch(e => console.log('Failed to convert:', e));

As abortOnError is set to true above, xditaToAst will fail when it encounters any error (XML syntax errors, validation errors, etc.). If instead you want to ignore any errors and work with whatever data the function could collect, abortOnError to false instead.

Experimental JDita Model

If you would prefer a simpler object model than the lwdita-ast to work with, we have an experimental object model called JDita. To use this, you can pass the output of xditaToAst through the experimental converter function astToJdita. Note that this API is subject to change! For example:

xditaToAst(xdita, abortOnError)
  .then(ast => astToJdita(ast))
  .then(jdita => console.log(JSON.stringify(jdita.json, null, 2))
  .catch(e => console.log('Failed to convert:', e));

XDITA Serialization Example

A full example with an additional option for serializing the AST object back into XML can be found in the file example.ts.

import { InMemoryTextSimpleOutputStreamCollector, XditaSerializer } from "@evolvedbinary/lwdita-xdita/xdita-serializer";

const indentXmlOutput = true;
const indentation = '\t';
const indentationSize = 1;

const outputStream = new InMemoryTextSimpleOutputStreamCollector();
const serializer = new XditaSerializer(outputStream, indentXmlOutput, indentation, indentationSize);
const xdita = serializer.serialize(ast);

console.log(xdita);

• You can replace InMemoryTextSimpleOutputStreamCollector with your own OutputStream implementation by implementing the interface SimpleOutputStream.

• The serialized XML will faithfully contain all XML node types apart from CDATA nodes which are currently unsupported.

Development

Prerequisites

For development, you will need Node.js and a node package manager to be installed in your environment.

• Minimal Node version: v20.1.0
• Yarn version v4.2.2.
• Optional: This project uses Yarn as its build system. Although we don't support it, if you prefer, it should also be possible to use npm instead of yarn.

Installation

Clone the lwdita repository:

git clone https://github.com/evolvedbinary/lwdita.git

Change to the lwdita directory:

cd lwdita

Install all packages:

yarn install

Packages

This project uses Yarn workspaces. The current packages, aka. "workspaces" are lwdita-xdita and lwdita-ast and can be found in folder packages/.

Package lwdita-xdita contains all files and modules for parsing and serializing XDITA documents. Package lwdita-ast contains all files and modules for creating the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) of the parsed document, provided by package lwdita-xdita.

Both packages depend on each other, as indicated by the dependency in their respective package.json files, and they share the same global node modules and commands as declared in the package.json file in the root of the project.

If in the future different node modules or commands should be defined for the packages, then you are able to address the packages directly with command

yarn workspace <workspace_name> <command>

In the global package.json you can e.g. define specific commands for each package like following pattern:

"scripts": {
  "start:package-a": "yarn workspace package-a start",
  "start:package-b": "yarn workspace package-b start"
}

To get more information about contained workspaces, run command

yarn workspaces info

Build

To build the project, run:

yarn run build

This will create a ./dist folder in the root of each sub-module, which contains binaries that can be copied to your own project.

Generate the TSDoc Documentation

You can generate the documentation by running

yarn run generate-docs

This will generate a new folder docs containing an HTML file with the entire TSDoc lwdita documentation. Open this file in a browser to navigate through the documentation.

Test

This project also has tests which are written using the Mocha framework. To execute the test suite and view the code coverage, run:

yarn run test
yarn run coverage

Example

We have an example file to test the conversion: example.ts. This file contains a small example in XDITA format.

If you want to test this library and its conversion from XDITA to JDita, run:

yarn run example

How it Works

lwdita-xdita takes in documents in LwDITA XDITA (XML) format, and produces an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree).

XDITA is the LwDITA representation that uses XML to structure information. LwDITA is a subset of DITA, with new multimedia element types added to support interoperability with HTML5. Source: https://www.dita-ot.org/4.1/topics/lwdita-input

The conversion process starts by building a tree whose root node represents the XDITA Document Node, then appending each XDITA Element Node as a child node node in the tree.

This will generate a full document tree that represents the original XDITA document as a JavaScript object.

Here's how the nodes are created:

Examples of the nodes <title> and <topic>:

Publishing a Release

To publish a new release of lwdita please follow these instructions:

NOTE The project uses Semantic Versioning, and you should make sure to choose the appropriate next version number to supply to yarn release.

cd lwdita
yarn release 1.2.3