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Lessons Learned with upgrading DITA-OT? (Need to move PDF output customizations to a newer version of OT)

Elizabeth Gschwind

FICO will soon be upgrading from LiveContent Architect 11.1.3 to the latest version of Tridion Docs. Tridion Docs no longer supports the old version of the DITA-OT that we run our PDF output through (version 1.5.2), so part of the project will involve porting our PDF customizations to a newer version of the OT. Because the structure of the OT has changed significantly, this will not be an easy task.

Can anyone share any lessons they learned when doing this? Best practices? Things to watch out for? Any advice at all? Thank you in advance!
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    Hi Elizabeth,

    I did same thing last year. I migrated our stylesheets from DITA-OT 1.7.5 to 2.5.4. It's not best practice, but I recommend following process to achieve successful migration.

    1. Survey differences between LCA and TD14

    There are many changes regarding the DITA-OT related implementation of Content Manager. For example,

    a) How to launch DITA-OT
    LCA uses batch command, but TD14 uses powershell command

    b) Preprocess and postprocess for publishing
    LCA uses vb scripts to control preprocess and postprocess for publishing. In TD14, preprocess and postprocess are described in XML Publishing Plug-in Settings.

    c) Output metadata control
    If your PDF stylesheets read metadata output from Content Manager, you should change the method to designate required metadata. LCA uses 'ReqMetaDataExportForPublication.xml' and 'ReqMetaDataExportForPublicationXMLForPubObject.xml' files. In TD14, the required metadata are specified in XML Publishing Plug-in Settings. In addition, though 'ishjobticket.xml' file is generated for compatibility purpose, it not possible to control metadata output as same as LCA.

    I recommend that installing TD14 OOB in your environment and confirm these changes.

    2. Verify DITA-OT compatibility

    The versions of base software of DITA-OT are different between DITA-OT 1.5 in LCA and DITA-OT 2.X/3.X in TD14. And these affect stylesheet compatibility.

    - Versions of SAXON
    - JRE
    - Ant

    I ran into following compatibility issues:

    - Some Ant codes did not work properly. I had to modify those codes.
    - Some stylesheets were not able to launch using Ant. I used the 'dita.bat' to launch them.
    - Some stylesheets did not work with AdoptOpenJDK. In our site, both AdoptOpenJDK and JDK8 are installed.

    3. Modify stylesheets codes to adapt them to latest DITA-OT

    In general, preprocess order and its outcome are different depending on versions of DITA-OT. If your styleseets have customized DITA-OT preprocess, you may have to be modify the codes to adapt it to new DITA-OT.

    Hope this will help your project.

    Cheers,

    Naoki
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