2.5 Publishing Technical Documents

Aras Technical Documentation solution provides the capability to export the contents of a Technical Document as XML, HTML, or PDF. This part of the solution is available to Aras’s subscribers.

Publishing also requires that the Aras Conversion Server and Aras Agent Service be configured properly.

To publish Technical Documents, the following needs to be installed:

• Aras Conversion Server (See Aras Innovator - Conversion Server Setup Guide)
• Aras Agent Service (See Section 5.13 of the Aras Innovator – Installation Guide)
• Aras Publishing Service (See Aras Innovator – Publishing Service Setup Guide)
• Aras HTML to PDF Converter (See Aras Innovator – HTML to PDF Converter Setup Guide)

Publishing Technical Documents requires two Feature Licenses – Aras.PublishingService and Aras.HTMLtoPDFConverter.

By default, the conversion rules required for Aras Technical Documentation Publishing are added to the Default Conversion Server. If your Innovator setup requires the use of a different Conversion Server, the following Conversion Rules should be added to the Converters tab on the appropriate Conversion Server item in the database:

• tp_HtmlPublishingConverter
• tp_PdfPublishingConverter
• tp_XmlPublishingConverter

The Output Settings map a stylesheet, configured in the Stylesheet tab (Section 2.4), to a selected Output Type: Editor, HTML, or PDF. Although it may be preferable to have document content to appear the same in all three, there are specific CSS settings that only apply to paged content (e.g, PDF) and Administrators may choose to have certain content styled differently in the Editor.

To create an Output Type, Edit the associate Document Type and add a row in the Output Setting tab:

Select the Output Type:

Specify a unique Name for the Output Type. Optionally, a Classification for the associated Tech Doc Enabled ItemType (e.g., tp_Block) can be selected. In this case, the selected Stylesheet will only apply for Documents that have this Classification specified. Finally, choose the Stylesheet created in Section2.4.

For HTML and PDF output formats, and when multiple Output Settings are configured, the user has the ability to select one of the Output Style Settings when publishing. This capability allows a user to publish the same Technical Document with different styles/configuration based on a choice made in the Publishing Dialog.

The Style Settings form field will be enabled, and the drop-down list populated, whenever there has been more than one Output Setting configured for the selected Conversion Format. In these cases, the initial/default selection is based on the order of the Output Settings configured for the Document Type. Selecting the drop-down list will expose all other Output Settings. Selecting a specific Style Setting will result in the selected Output Setting to be applied during the publish operation. If there is only one, it will be selected by default and the Style Settings drop-down will be disabled.