Single-Source Publishing Across Multiple Formats

Friday, October 2 — 2:00pm-2:45pm

George Bina
Managing Director
Syncro Soft

In today's world, we cannot expect to find a single format for information across an enterprise, people write spreadsheets, Markdown, HTML, comments within the source code of different programming languages, structured XML based documents, and so on. This makes it very difficult to publish — as a single publication — content that originates in different formats, without re-encoding that in a common format. We propose the use of URLs to dynamically convert content from one format to another, thus we avoid duplicating information and realize single source publishing across multiple formats. As long as the information has a structure that is machine processable, we should be able to convert from one form of encoding to another. For example, if you have a table encoded as an Excel sheet then you can get a DITA topic out of that just by referring to that file with a URL like "excel2dita:/path/to/excel/file.xls". To test how this actually works, we implemented such URLs that perform dynamic conversions for:

• Excel to DITA
• Google Sheets to DITA
• JavaDoc to DITA
• Java source to DITA
• Markdown to DITA
• HTML to DITA Custom
• XML format to SVG
• Comma Separated Values to DITA and back (to test also round-tripping support)

Basically with this simple dynamic conversion technology (just use a URL to point to files in different format and get them as DITA or some other format) we can bridge between formats with advantages of avoiding duplicating content and thus reducing work and potential errors and being able to provide a unified publishing framework across different formats.

 

About

George Bina has more than 15 years of experience in working with XML and XML-related technologies and contributes to a number of XML related open-source projects. He is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor.