Generating revision bars
If you use Antenna House Formatter or RenderX XEP, you can generate revision bars in your PDF output by
using the @changebar attribute of the DITAVAL <revprop> element.
fo:change-bar formatting object.@changebar simply says:
@changebar- When flag has been set, specify a changebar color, style, or character, according to the changebar support of the target output format. If flag has not been set, this attribute is ignored.
The syntax for @changebar is a sequence of name and value pairs that are delimited by semicolons,
for example:
<revprop action="flag" val="rev01"
changebar="color:black;style:solid;width:0.5pt"
/>To produce a revision bar, you must specify a value for style and should specify a value for width so you get a visible rule.
Each name and value pair corresponds to an attribute of the XSL-FO fo:change-bar-begin element. The following attributes and values are available:
- style
- The style to use for the line, as for other XSL-FO rules (@change-bar-style). The value solid produces a solid rule; the default value is none.
- color
- Any color value recognized by XSL-FO, including the usual color names or a hex color value. The default value is black.
- offset
- The space to offset the revision bar from the edge of the text column. You can use points (pt) or millimeters (mm).
- placement
- The side of the text column on which to place the revision bar. The allowed values are start (left side for left-to-right languages) and end (right side for left-to-right languages). The default value is start.
- width
- The width of the rule as a measurement value. Typical values are 1pt and 0.5pt, which renders a hairline rule.
XSL-FO 1.1 does not provide for revision bars that are not rules, so there is no way to get text revision indicators instead of rules, for example, using a number in place of a rule. Antenna House Formatter provides a proprietary extension to enable this, but the DITA-OT PDF transformation does not take advantage of it.