BOOK STRUCTURE VIEWER


GLOBAL OPERATIONS: HOW TO


You can use Book Structure Viewer (BSV) to perform many global operations on DITA and IBMIDDOC documents. Here's how to do some of them:

  1. To view the structure of a DITA document, open its .ditamap or .maplist file. This gives you a tree view of all the navigable files in the document. To expand or contract a branch of the tree, click on a + or - symbol. Tip: Use the "Preferences --> Default File Open type..." menu to specify the default file filter BSV uses when you browse to open a new document. For example, if you mainly work with DITA files, you can set the file filter to ".DITAMAP" or ".MAPLIST". If you mainly work with IBMIDDOC files, you could set it to ".IDD".

    To view a .dita file, click on its name in the tree view.

    The "Search" menu and toolbar buttons provide all the usual search operations. You can also go to a specific line number in a file.

  2. To view the structure of an IBMIDDOC document, open its .IDD file. This gives you a tree view of the document's embedded files. To expand or contract a branch of the tree, click on a + or - symbol.

    To view a .DITA, .IDE, .EPS, or .GIF file, click on its name in the tree view.
    Tip: Use the "Preferences --> Graphics programs..." menu to specify your preferred file viewers for .EPS and .GIF files.

  3. To run a fast, interactive, sequential global search across all the files in your document, use the "Search --> LFIND..." menu or the "Globe" button. To search using a regular expression, check the "regular expression" checkbox.
  4. To run a fast, interactive, sequential global search-and-replace across all the files in your document, use the "Search --> LCHANGE..." menu or the "Lightning" button . (Readonly files are never overwritten.) To use regular expression find and replace strings, check the "regular expression" checkbox.
  5. To create and save multiple named configurations (file paths), use the "Preferences --> Path to book files..." menu or the "Swiss Army Knife" button . For example, you could create a configuration named "My First Book" which sets the path to embedded files for My First Book, and another configuration named "My Second Book", which sets the path to embedded files for My Second Book. To switch between configurations, click on the "Swiss Army Knife" button.
  6. To list all the IDs in your book, or in a specific file, use the "IDs" menus . You can sort and filter the IDs in various ways, display information about their contexts, and print or save the listings.

    The IDs menu also allows you to check for duplicate IDs.

  7. To list all the cross-references in your book, or in a specific file, use the "Xrefs" menus . Full information about each xref is given -- e.g. the xrefid, the source file in which it occurs, the element-type of the target (division, table, fig, etc.), the title or caption of the target, and the target file.

    The Xrefs menu also allows you to check for unresolved cross-references.

  8. To remove all revision bars from your book, or from a specific file; or to "flatten" all revision attributes to a single value, use the "Revbars" menus. You can also list the revbar IDs in a book, and the files in which specific IDs occur, filtering the lists by revbar ID and/or file-type (ALL, RO, RW). You can selectively remove or flatten revbars.
  9. To display the trademark markup in your book, use the "Trademarks" menu. You can also remove all trademark tagging from an entire document.
  10. Use the 3 "tick" buttons to run "one-click" checks for:

DITA-specific functions:

  1. To list the navigable topics referenced from a .ditamap or .maplist file, use the "DITA-> List Topics in navigation tree" menu. Information about each topic-reference includes the topic-type (topic, concept, task, or reference), navtitle, href, numeric "level" in the navigation tree, and name of the topic file. You can filter the listings by topic-type and level, and print or save them.
  2. To display information about the topic file pointed to by a topicref, click on the topicref in the Topics listing. The resulting "Topic details" dialog displays the following information about the topic file: its full filename; the referenced topic's title, type, ID, navtitle, and searchtitle; the topic's parent XML node; its child XML nodes.
  3. To display the XML content of a node, click on its name in the "Topic details" dialog. You can display the topic node itself, its parent, or any of its child nodes.
  4. To validate the XML content of each referenced topic file against the relevant DTD, as a map file is loaded:

IBMIDDOC-specific functions:

  1. To list the divisions in your book, or in a specific file, use the "Divisions" menus. Full information about each division is given -- e.g. title, ID (if any), numeric "level" at which it is embedded, and file it occurs in. You can filter the divisions in various ways, and print or save the listings.
  2. To categorize the information in your book as "concept"-, "task"-, or "reference"-type information, use the "Classify" menu. You do this by adding class attributes to divisions.
    Tip: It is useful to classify all divisions before converting a book from IBMIDDOC to DITA. If you do so, each division will be converted to the type of topic that you have classified it as.
  3. Use a user-written "exit program" to process target strings found by an LCHANGE search-and-replace operation. This feature allows you to use a simple REXX (or VBScript or JavaScript) script to program complex replacement operations. A sample exit program written in VBScript, sampleLCExitProg.vbs, is provided in the BSV installation directory.

    Specify the name of your exit program on the "Preferences --> LCHANGE exit program" menu. Enable the exit by checking the "Send found text to a user-written exit program for processing" checkbox on the first LCHANGE dialog-box. (The default is unchecked, so you can send some search strings to the exit program and others not.)

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