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Sequential Function Chart

Stephanie Ferreira

Hello

Does anybody know how it would be possible to create sequential function charts or flow charts with DITA ?

Example (sorry it's in french)

Flowchart in French showing a decision-making process for DEF management with various outcomes leading to 'FIN' or end.

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[edited by: Trados AI at 6:29 AM (GMT 0) on 5 Mar 2024]
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    Hi, I don't know of an easy way to do this in DITA. You would have to determine your DITA content model surrounding this and then have the publishing output render the sequential function chart. Not a trivial exercise. I suspect that the easiest way may be to create your chart in an external tool and save the chart as an image. That's just my opinion.

    Pam Noreault | Knowledge Center Solutions Architect

  • 0 in reply to Pam Noreault
    Agreed. This is what we do as well. In particular, I use Visio to save the chart as an SVG.

    We use Antenna House to produce PDF output, which natively supports SVG images. We had to add a plugin to support SVG images for our HTML5 and LiveContent Reach output to convert these to PNG, but you could simply do this manually. However, having an SVG image in the PDF creates a much higher quality graphic. However, you could of course just use PNG or some other raster format and avoid the need for any DITA OT customizations all together.

    To my knowledge, there isn't really a clear DITA structure for flowcharts, anyway. So you would either have to create a specialization or customization to include some other XML flowchart standard (assuming such a thing exists). It would then have to be rendered somehow, and that would almost certainly be done in SVG, thus taking you back to that format. As your DITA XML editor likely wouldn't have nearly the ease of use of something purpose-built like Visio, etc., I think using images is far more practical.
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  • 0 in reply to Pam Noreault
    Agreed. This is what we do as well. In particular, I use Visio to save the chart as an SVG.

    We use Antenna House to produce PDF output, which natively supports SVG images. We had to add a plugin to support SVG images for our HTML5 and LiveContent Reach output to convert these to PNG, but you could simply do this manually. However, having an SVG image in the PDF creates a much higher quality graphic. However, you could of course just use PNG or some other raster format and avoid the need for any DITA OT customizations all together.

    To my knowledge, there isn't really a clear DITA structure for flowcharts, anyway. So you would either have to create a specialization or customization to include some other XML flowchart standard (assuming such a thing exists). It would then have to be rendered somehow, and that would almost certainly be done in SVG, thus taking you back to that format. As your DITA XML editor likely wouldn't have nearly the ease of use of something purpose-built like Visio, etc., I think using images is far more practical.
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