Re: [Serna] Migrating Custom DITA Templates from 3.4 to 3.5.1

Eliot,

there are no implications, except that you should place .sdt files in 
locations where they will be found (if you want to keep your project 
outside Serna, use 'Additional plugins' path setting), and that it is a 
best practice to use $TEMPLATE_PATH for building relative paths for files 
which are stored inside your plugin folder. Nothing prevents you to use 
absolute paths and/or $DATA_DIR relative paths, however.

This is also completely orthogonal to catalog support. However, from your 
error message I can guess that Serna uses wrong .sdt file, which in turn 
points to the wrong catalog (template-specific catalogs also have higher 
precedence).

Regards,

-- Paul

On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Eliot Kimber wrote:

> Paul Antonov wrote:
>> 
>> Eliot,
>> 
>> it seems that Serna does not use proper template, maybe because you are 
>> trying to use obsolete directory layout. Serna searches for '.sdt' 
>> (document template) files in two places: in all sub-directories of 
>> $DATA_DIR/plugins (Serna3_5.app/Contens/plugins on Mac), and in all 
>> sub-directories of location specified by 'Additional plugins' path in 
>> Preferences. It is desirable to use paths relative to $TEMPLATE_DIR in your 
>> .sdt files, because it makes them location-independent.
>
> I'm not sure I fully understand the implications here. Are you saying that 
> all the dependencies for the template (that is, all the components of my 
> DTDs) should be stored relative to the templates/ directory?
>
> If so, that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid, having to have multiple 
> copies of my local declarations--in the case of DITA stuff, if you've got a 
> local install of the Toolkit then you've already had to configure it to 
> resolve your local shells and any local specializations you might be 
> using--there should be no need to make copies of those for editors that can 
> use XML catalogs to resolve the references from shell DTDs to their 
> dependencies.
>
> Except for Arbortext Editor (which doesn't support XML catalogs), I should, 
> in theory, be able to use a single set of declarations and catalogs with all 
> XML editors. That ensures that all DITA-aware tools are always using the same 
> exact declarations.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eliot
>
> -- 
> Eliot Kimber
> Senior Solutions Architect
> "Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
> Main: 610.631.6770
> www.reallysi.com
> www.rsuitecms.com
>