Exporting a Technical Document

To Export a Technical Document, select the ‘Publish Document’ Action from the Actions menu while a Technical Document is opened in the editor or when a Technical Document Item is selected in the search grid. Doing so will display the Publishing Dialog

Figure 38.
The Publishing / Export process executes on the server based on the input settings provided by the user and is initiated by selecting the Convert button in the Publishing dialog. During conversion the user is presented with a progress dialog that is displayed until the process has completed. The execution time varies with the size of the content to convert and the bandwidth/load on the network/server at the time. Once complete, the generated content is available to the user to either display within a browser window or download to store on the user’s system.

The Publish/Export function supports conversion to XML, HTML, and PDF.

The content of a Technical Document is stored natively as XML and based on the Document Type it was created with. The system adds to this XML to include specific markup, most of which is then removed in the export XML content. The markup that is exported with the data includes:

• <emph> tags surrounding all formatted text
• Metadata for table and list formatting
• URLs for images
• XML elements for each Technical Document content (Block)
• Unique ids for external referenced content (images, referenced documents, Business Objects, etc.)

XML data includes just the text-based content. Images (graphics) include a URL back to the Innovator vault server for the actual image file.

The content of a Technical Document is stored natively as XML and based on the Technical Document Type it was created with. To display this content within the Editor, and when this content is exported as HTML, each Document Element is mapped to a <div> HTML tag with a class name equal to the name of the Document Element. In this way, document style rules (CSS) can target the specific elements in the HTML. All formatted text is surrounding by a <span>tag with a class name ‘emph’. In addition, all style rules are included with the generated HTML within the ‘Head’ portion of the HTML document. All Table Document Elements are converted to <table> HTML elements and all List Document Elements are converted to <ul> or <ol> HTML elements based on the List configuration (see Section 3.2.4). Finally, all style (CSS) is included with the HTML content.

To generate PDF content, a Technical Document is first converted to HTML and then to PDF using separate server-side utility. Allstyle rules that can be applied to HTML can also be applied to the PDF content. However, PDF is a page-based media, and all PDF content is converted to a specific page size. The following additional style rules can be applied for PDF exports:

• Page numbers
• Page headers and footers
• Page margins
• Table of Content generation
• PDF Metadata

Use the following procedure to publish your document to PDF.

1. Select Actions>Publish Document. If you have not saved the document, the following message appears:

Figure 39.

2. Click OK. The Publishing dialog box appears

Figure 40.

3. Select PDF from the Conversion Format dropdown list. The File Extension value changes accordingly.

4. Click Convert to start the conversion process. The following message appears when the conversion process starts:

Figure 41. When the conversion is complete, the document appears in a separate window:

Figure 42.
The entries in the Table of Contents are links to the different sections that enable you to navigate through the document. Section and page numbers appear in the Table of Contents.

The Language combo-box list shows each of the languages configured within Innovator. Select the appropriate language to include in the export. Note that the language currently selected may not be the language displayed in the Editor.

Filters can be applied the same way they are in the editor (see section Filters) with the same result on the content included. Note that content filtered out will be excluded from the exported content. To apply Filters, select the Create button next to the Filter Condition edit box in the Publishing dialog. Select the Filters to apply and select Apply. The selected Filters will be displayed in the Filter Condition edit box.

A default file extension is created based on the Conversion Format chosen. Users can overwrite this value if needed and the extension string is used for all non-image files created by the export process.

Linked content refers to Technical Documents that are the target of a Link (see section Links). When exporting, the user has the option to include linked content or ignore it. When including linked content, the user can choose to either embed the linked data at the end of the exported content or create a separate document and link to it. Figure 26 describes the resulting files that get created when a Technical Document that has a linked Technical Document and a Graphic included is exported.

Figure 43.

Linked Documents refer to the Technical Document instances that include a Document Element that is the target of a link that exists in a separate, source document. When exporting, the following options are available:
Join: The default. The content of the Technical Document that includes the linked Document Element is appended to the source document and the link is updated to point to the internal location.
Separate: A separate document is created, and the link is update to point to the generated file.
Skip: The content of the linked document is not included in the export

Linked images refer to any graphic that is included in a Technical Document. Image files are stored in the Innovator vault and accessible via URL to the vault server. When exporting, the following options are available:

• Link to Server: The default. A URL to the vault server is included as the ‘src’ location of the image. Generated files refer to the innovator server for the image content.

• Include with Export: All referenced image files are included with the export and stored in a generated sub-directory – ‘/Resources’. Image files are named using their ID followed by the appropriate file extension. The ‘src’ location of the image is updated to point to the relative path and file.

Users can either view the converted results in a browser window or download and save the converted data locally on the user’s file system. Note that when the user chooses to Separate linked documents (see section Linked Documents) and/or Include linked graphics (see section Linked Images) the downloaded file will be a zip archive file containing all of the relevant related files that have been created.

To view converted data in a browser window, select Show in browser from the Conversion Result combo-box list. After the conversion process has completed, a separate browser window will be opened to display the converted data. In this case, the converted data is left on the server and the browser displays it.

To download and save converted content, select Save into file from the Conversion Result combo-box list. After the conversion process has completed, the user will be prompted to identify the location to save the converted results.