Produce front-page that doesn't follow main template

[IanMayo]

I wish our document to have a front-page that doesn't contain any of the web-help elements - title, search, logo, headers/footers, etc.

We could have an outputclass in the .dita file page-level element, if that helps.

Note: there is some sample content to play with in nav_trial\body-content folder of LegacyMan. The welcome.dita is the page that I'd like to have no web-help decorations.

Update: we do still need the color-shaded header and footer bars. It's just the web-help main title bar we don't need (with the home link, title, search box, links).

[frank-zimmermann]

In general, it could be an "empty" page, including the dita data, but no other components, right?

[IanMayo]

Yes - just the plain DITA off the page.

[IanMayo]

I guess that if we had a page-level class element, we could hide the wh (webhelp) elements in CSS.

[frank-zimmermann]

Do you want to have a link to the "front-page" in the header on all other pages? From where do you want to link to this page? Or is that not necessary at all?

[IanMayo]

Hello @frank-zimmermann - no, I don't need a front page link on all pages.

[frank-zimmermann]

The attribute outputclass is a good hint. Will take that to suppress creating the link in the header and the main page. I think I will do a modification in XSLT again.

[frank-zimmermann]

Hi @IanMayo, the target folder is not included in the repo. To suppress the topic page in the header, we need to add the attribute toc="no" When the format is "dita", the HTML for the topic page also has all CSS information, which means a header and footer.

But we can change the format to "html". You then also need to create "front-page.htm" inside the target/dita folder. With that, you can write directly HTML content into it.

OR: Do you want to write dita content to it?

<topicref href="./front-page.htm" format="html" toc="no"/>

[IanMayo]

Hello Frank, I did start off by creating a unique html page, but the DITA publish process doesn't pull the the images into the deployment, and they have to be addressed using a URL that I don't expect my authors to understand/recognise.

So, having this welcome page as DITA is my preferred outcome.

I'm going to update our mock content this afternoon to more closely match the current state of the target content.

[frank-zimmermann]

Then I will investigate some time to handle it as .dita by using the outputclass-attribute, as you suggested.

[IanMayo]

Sorry Frank - when I got onsite I realised I was mistaken above. It was having it in .dita that prevented the image dependencies from being picked up. The working version is for me to have a welcome.html that my python code parses and generates welcome.dita. This, of course is then published to welcome.html in WebHelp format.

(I know the round-trip may seem silly, but the original welcome.html contains hundreds of lines of DreamWeaver-generated cruft and unnecessary layout/GUI elements it's good to get rid of).

Anyway - the crux of this task is to hide the web-help banner from welcome.html. If we can do it via fieldman.css - then great :-D

[IanMayo]

Note: I've just seen that the id of the body for the published HTML page is Welcome. That should make the CSS locator easier :-)

[IanMayo]

Done.