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DDIXSL

DDI

A tool to transform and format content of DDI documents as HTML pages and PDF files, and in other formats.

Easy-to-use and searchable documentation based on DDI documents can be generated by DDIXSL. Main target formats are HTML files for web-browsing, Microsoft HTML Help for off-line use, and PDF for printing.

How does it work? 

A DDIXSL style sheet can be applied to a DDI document with an XSLT processor. In a first step a DocBook document is generated based on the information in the DDI document. In a second step DocBook XSL style sheets are applied to produce the target formats.

What are the prerequisites? 

Valid DDI (V2.0) documents are required as input. DDIXSL is based on freely available software components.

  • XSLT processor like XSLTProc, Saxon, or Xalan 
  • DocBook XSL style sheets 
  • Eclipse Platform Help System or 
  • Microsoft HTML Help System 

What is DocBook?

DocBook could be understood as a flexible multi-channel publishing system. DocBook is a structured mark-up language; a similar solution for technical documents in general as DDI for social science data documentation. DocBook XSL style sheets can be used to convert DocBook XML source into different target formats. DocBook XSL can generate large documents into chunks of HTML files. 

Microsoft HTML Help

The well-known Microsoft Windows HTML Help System comes with a fully functional Help Viewer in which users can browse and search DDI-based documentations. 

What is Eclipse?

The Eclipse Platform is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for programmers, which includes a server-based help system. It could be used to offer any HTML-based documentation. The high-performance text search engine Apache Lucene is included. 

Features of the documentation as Eclipse Help, Microsoft HTML Help, PDF

Every detail (content of all elements and attributes) of the DDI documentation is included in the generated documentation. Links are generated based on the internal and external references. Variable groups, variables, and included tables will be processed in an appropriate way.

The documentation is provided with a collapsible navigation pane (the DDI hierarchy) on the left side, and documentation content on the right, and can at anytime be searched. With Eclipse Help the documentation is searchable over studies, per study, or only in a main section of the documentation (for example variables description). 

Status 

This is work in progress. The current state includes a XSL style sheet to transform the content of a DDI document into a DocBook document. It is suitable for off-line generation of documentation. DDI2DocBook.xsl is in beta state, thus the generated DocBook document, and the generated target formats have a similar quality. The HTML files seem to be quiet usable, but broken PDF files are common. 

Features and work in preparation 

  • Special handling of category groups, nCubes, quality of DocBook document. 
  • Configuration options for flexible handling. 
  • Documentation 

Screenshots 

Examples 

Download

DDIXSL is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See status of the software above. 

Download the zipped files (version 2005-05-18): http://db.zuma-mannheim.de/DDIXSL/downloads/ddixsl.zip

stats © GESIS Joachim Wackerow 2006-01-31