Bookmap

The OASIS bookmap application of DITA allows you to produce your DITA topics and even whole DITA maps as the content of a formally defined book. This allows you to produce not only maps for online deliverables, but also PDFs with the same content, replete with covers, formal notices and frontmatter, and so forth.

A bookmap is a special kind of DITA map that defines the major structures and setup information for producing maps of information as a book.

A typical DITA map might have a title and then a set of topicrefs, in a sequence, in a hierarchy, or both, that define the structure by which topics are to be viewed as a complete information deliverable. A DITA map does not have structures to specifically designate how topics are to be treated as chapters, preface content, or even for constructing a cover or special content (such as edition notice boilerplate). To enable DITA content to be viewed in a more booklike manner, you need a context that represents all the special processing that might be invested on producing a map or set of maps as a book. That is the role of DITA's bookmap specialization.

A bookmap has the following specialized major structures:

• An optional title or booktitle (which itself can have substructure for complex titles)
• Optional bookmeta (all the information about the book--its owners, authors, publishing data, and so forth)
• Optional frontmatter (the usual preface and introductory topics in a book prior to the gist of the book, and also including booklists--containers for special collections of information in a book)
• Any number of chapters or parts (which can contain chapters)
• Any number of appendix topics
• Optional backmatter (often for special notices or supplementary information, and also for booklists)
• Any number of reltables, as in a typical map.

As a specialization of DITA map, the DITA bookmap will be supported by default like a typical DITA map in DITA-aware editors and processing tools.

With appropriate style and functional overrides, XML editors can display a DITA bookmap just as they would the XML structure for other book-supporting DTDs, and specialized DITA processing or DITA bookmaps will exploit the book metadata and book features in high quality paged output.

For example, you might have a DITA map that represents the hierarchy you intend for a particular Web deliverable of your DITA topics. Now you wish to also produce that map as a formal book to be packaged along with your boxed product. You can open a new bookmap instance and define a title for the book, indicate any required publisher information in the bookmeta area, link in a preface, indicate whether you want a table of figures along with the table of contents, and finally create a chapter element that references your existing DITA map. You have created a complete book deliverable, at least in a simplistic manner. The design of bookmap allows you to refine your deliverable and even make the book version of the map have content that is specific to the book version, versus the Web version.

<bookmap id="taskbook">
  <booktitle>
    <mainbooktitle>Product tasks</mainbooktitle>
    <booktitlealt>Tasks and what they do</booktitlealt>
  </booktitle>
  <bookmeta>
    <author>John Doe</author>
    <bookrights>
      <copyrfirst>
        <year>2006</year>
      </copyrfirst>
      <bookowner>
        <person href="janedoe.xml">Jane Doe</person>
      </bookowner>
    </bookrights>
  </bookmeta>
  <frontmatter>
    <preface/>
  </frontmatter>
  <chapter format="ditamap" href="installing.ditamap"/>
  <chapter href="configuring.xml"/>
  <chapter href="maintaining.xml">
    <topicref href="maintainstorage.xml"/>
    <topicref href="maintainserver.xml"/>
    <topicref href="maintaindatabase.xml"/>
  </chapter>
  <appendix href="task_appendix.xml"/>
</bookmap>

DTD:

bookmap.dtd
bookmap.mod

Schema:

bookmap.xsd
bookmapGrp.xsd
bookmapMod.xsd