Past projects

  1. Supporting multilingual documents and translations.

  2. Exporting and post processing HdM course data.

  3. Displaying version differences related to revisions of a given document.

  4. Implementing end user editor support and style sheets for a dedicated XML document schema.

DITA based lecture notes

The promising DITA standard allows for topic oriented documents.

Current lecture notes are being represented as Docbook in a linear fashion. Employing DITA requires:

  • Identify sample topics.

  • Identify topic relationships for building maps.

  • Customizing target format generators (HTML, PDF, ...).

The current lecture notes content may serve as a starting point for creating appropriate assets. Other content may be used as well: The project's goal is providing a self-consistent prototype.

Both XMLMind and OxygenXml support DITA documents and related topic maps in particular.

Assembly based lecture notes

This suggestion is related to the latter. Starting from DocBook version 5.1 support for assemblies is being provided. These are another means addressing topic oriented content creation.

XMLMind and OxygenXml provide assembly support.

Enhanced Maven/Gradle archetype

Deriving targets from DocBook content may be effected by using appropriate Maven archetypes.

While these archetypes provide a good build automation they fall short when transformations require preprocessing of images with respect to a given target format.

Example: An author may provide a PDF image by virtue of <imagedata fileref="image.pdf">. Generated HTML or Epub targets will require a transformation to e.g. SVG or PNG.

Likewise embedded video assets may also require type transformations for supporting different browsers.