Arbortext Editor enables you to publish both DITA maps and DITA topics. For DITA maps, you can also select part of the map and just publish the selected part of the map.

A Arbortext Styler stylesheet (.style) is included for use with each of the default DITA document types. You can use these stylesheets directly or as a basis for developing your own enhanced or customized stylesheets for publishing DITA documents. The sample stylesheets are also available in a modular format, enabling you to use the existing modules as building blocks to develop a stylesheet for you environment. See the Arbortext Styler online help for more information about developing stylesheets for DITA documents.

You can publish DITA documents to the following types of output:

You can also use File > Print Preview to preview your DITA document before publishing. The Arbortext Editor profiling feature and the DITA standard DITAVAL files are both supported for DITA documents, enabling you to filter content in your published output.

Publishing a DITA topic is similar to publishing other types of documents. Once you publish a DITA topic using Arbortext Editor or Arbortext Publishing Engine, the topic is published based on the associated stylesheet and published to the specified output format. The topic is published as if it were contained in a DITA map ensuring that cross references and links resolve correctly. However, publishing an individual topic with cross references and links usually does not have the same result as publishing a DITA map that references all of the topics. Publishing topics is often more useful for proofreading and reviews. You should usually do the final publication from a DITA map.

A DITA map is a collection of references to DITA topics and other content, so when you publish a DITA map the publishing process first assembles all of the content referenced in the map into an intermediate document called the resolved document for styling. The resolved document is then published based on the associated stylesheet and published to the specified output format. If a map contains references to DITA or other types of documents that are not contained in the map you are publishing, the publishing process collects the targets of these references during publishing enabling those references to resolve correctly in the output. The referenced files are stored in a folder that has a name based on the output document with .ditaLinks appended to the folder name.

You can also produce a version of the resolved document for styling through the Arbortext EditorEdit > Edit Resolved Document > For Styling menu choice. This version of the resolved document enables you to use Arbortext Styler to develop a stylesheet for the map. The resolved document for styling is a temporary document that is intended only for stylesheet development. Unlike the resolved document for editing, any changes you make to the resolved document for styling will not be reflected in the associated topics when the resolved document is closed.

For output types EPUB, HTML Help, and Web, which produce several HTML files, the publishing process retains the names of DITA input files and any directory structure in which the input files are contained by default. You can change these and other default settings in Arbortext Styler.

You can use the deliveryTarget profile attribute on topic references (topicref elements) in DITA maps, and in topics, to control whether the referenced topic or content is included in a specific type of output. In shipped document types, the deliveryTarget attribute has the following allowed values:

These values mimic those permitted for the print attribute, which was deprecated in DITA 1.3. The print attribute is still supported in Arbortext Editor.

It is recommended that the deliveryTarget attribute is given values that reflect the type of output being targeted, for example epub, pdf, or html.

If you are using values of deliveryTarget for this purpose, you must select the required value as a profile setting during the publishing process.

If a topic reference contains other topic references, the value of the deliveryTarget attribute on the parent topic reference controls whether all of the topic references are included in the specified output. The deliveryTarget attribute values for the nested topic references are ignored in this case.

Arbortext Editor supports most of the key reference processing defined in the Processing key references section of the OASIS DITA Architectural Specification for publishing. Text content replacement during publishing is supported through both text insertion into empty elements that reference a key definition and by using the conkeyref attribute.

In some cases, a conkeyref reference might not have a topic ID in the reference. For example, when the key definition only contains the URI of the topic and the content key reference refers to the key name and an element ID inside of the referenced topic. The topic referred to in the URI might contain other topics, either because it is a Ditabase or it contains nested topics, and those topics might contain elements with the same ID. In this case, Arbortext Editor assumes the first element in the topic with the specified ID is the target of the content reference. If the topic contains multiple elements with the same ID, this could result in the incorrect element being the target of the content reference. It is a best practice to make sure the topic ID is included on any key definitions you intend to use for conkeyref references.