Customize the text formats in Preview view

You can change the look and feel of a topic viewed in the Preview view using your own cascading style sheet (CSS).

In the IXIA CCMS Desktop, users can preview the topic in the Preview view by right-clicking the topic and clicking Show Preview. If the default format used in Preview view does not meet your needs, you can customize it by creating your own CSS file and declaring it in the preview.xsl file in the /system/xsl/html folder. You can also add parameters to the preview.xsl file to overwrite the build parameter defaults set in xsl/html/xslhtml/dita2htmlImpl.xsl to make other changes to the Preview view. By adding your customizations to the preview.xsl file, it will allow you to preserve your changes through upgrades.

Important: Make configuration changes in a test environment and confirm they work before copying them to a production environment.

To customize the text formats in Preview view:

  1. In the TEXTML Administration perspective, connect to your server.
  2. Create your own cascading style sheet (.css file) or you can base yours on the existing style sheets in the Repository. To create a new style sheet based on an existing one:
    1. Expand the Repository folder and find the commonltr.css (for languages read left-to-right ) and commonrtl.css (for languages read right-to-left) files in the /system/xsl/resource folder.
    2. Right-click the file that you want to use and click Export. In the Destination folder box, type a path to a folder on your local disk or click Browse to choose a location. Under Export options, click to select the Content checkbox. Click Ok.
    3. Rename the exported style sheet so you do not overwrite the existing one in the Repository.
    4. Make the necessary changes to the file and then save it.
  3. Insert your style sheet into the /system/xsl/resource folder.
    1. Right-click the resource folder and click Insert Documents.
    2. Click the Add file button and select your new style sheet.
    3. Click OK.
  4. Declare your new style sheet in the preview.xsl file.
    1. Right-click the the preview.xsl file in the /system/xsl/html folder and click Check out.
    2. Double-click the file to open it in the editor.
    3. Find where the .css files are declared and replace the existing file name with the name of your new style sheet.

      For example:

      <xsl:param name="CSS"/>
      <!-- IXIASOFT PATCH: Assumes the xsl is used for preview and that the html is saved in /preview/ -->
      	<xsl:param name="dita-css" select="'../system/xsl/resource/MyPreview_commonltr.css'"/> 
      	<xsl:param name="bidi-dita-css" select="'../system/xsl/resource/MyPreview_commonrtl.css'"/> 
      <!-- END PATCH -->
    4. Save, close, and check in the file.
  5. Overwrite the build parameter defaults, if required.
    1. Open the dita2htmlImpl.xsl file found in xsl/html/xslhtml/ and then copy the parameter that you want to overwrite.
    2. Paste it in the preview.xsl file and change its values as required.
    3. Save, close, and check in the file.
    For example, if you wanted to show the draft-comment element in the Preview view, you would paste and edit the parameter as follows:
    <!-- default "hide draft & cleanup content" processing parameter ('no' = hide them)-->
    <xsl:param name="DRAFT" select="'yes'"/>

    For example, the preview.xsl file would look like this:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <!-- This file is part of the DITA Open Toolkit project hosted on 
    Sourceforge.net. See the accompanying license.txt file for applicable licenses.-->
    <!-- (c) Copyright IBM Corp. 2004, 2005 All Rights Reserved. -->
    						
    <!-- ereview.xsl | DITA topic to HTML for ereview & webreview -->
    						
    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
     xmlns:saxon="http://icl.com/saxon"
     xmlns:xt="http://www.jclark.com/xt"
     extension-element-prefixes="saxon xt">
    						
    <!-- stylesheet imports -->
    <!-- the main dita to xhtml converter -->
    <xsl:import href="dita2xhtml.xsl"/>
    						
    <xsl:output method="html"
     encoding="UTF-8"
     indent="no"
     doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"
     doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
     />
    						
    <xsl:param name="CSS"/>
     <!-- IXIASOFT PATCH: Assumes the xsl is used for preview and that the html is saved in /preview/ -->
     <xsl:param name="dita-css" select="'../system/xsl/resource/MyPreview_commonltr.css'"/> <!-- left to right languages -->
     <xsl:param name="bidi-dita-css" select="'../system/xsl/resource/MyPreview_commonrtl.css'"/> <!-- bidirectional languages -->
     <!-- END PATCH -->
    						
     <!-- default "hide draft & cleanup content" processing parameter ('no' = hide them)-->
     <xsl:param name="DRAFT" select="'yes'"/><!-- "no" and "yes" are valid values; non-'yes' is ignored -->
    						
    </xsl:stylesheet>	
  6. Inform users of the changes and request that they close and reopen their CCMS Desktop to apply the changes.
The Preview view text formats are configured to match your custom CSS.