We make extensive use of DITAVAL files in the documents for our product family. I am looking for a way for writers to be able to specify a value from a DITAVAL file on an element in a DITA topic.
If I look at the Profiling tab of the Modify Attributes dialog on an element, the otherprops field is a selection field; it is not editable. Therefore, we seem to have only 2 options:
- Edit the DITA topic in an ASCII editor to add otherprops="xxxx" to an element, such as a paragraph element. I really do not want writers to edit DITA topics in an ASCII editor; that leads to all kinds of issues. :-)
- Modify the ditabase.pcf to add the values specified in the DITAVAL file. This is an issue, especially if writers are working on multiple products. Each product has a completely separate set of DITAVAL values and they are not necessarily related.
If the otherprops field in the Profiling tab was editable, that would seem to solve the issue because we could add the value (and specify the DITAVAL file to be used when we processed our document.
I am relatively new to using PTC Arbortext, so I hope that I am missing a simple solution?