Install and configure a rendition engine

Two types of rendition engines are supported for IBM FileNet P8 Publishing, the Rendition Engine that uses the Liquent Rendering Engine for rendering and the DITA Rendition Engine that uses the DITA Open Toolkit for rendering.

Rendition Engine Installation

To install and configure the Rendition Engine, follow the instructions in the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine Installation and Upgrade Guide. The Rendition Engine components should be located on a stand-alone server. For additional information on component collocation possibilities, see the sample configurations in the Planning section of the Plan and Prepare Your Environment for IBM FileNet P8 Platform.

NOTE  If the FileNet Content Engine components are not installed, please refer to the Installation Tasks located in the FileNet P8 Platform Installation and Upgrade Guide.

DITA Rendition Engine Installation

To install the DITA Rendition Engine

  1. Download the DITA Open Toolkit from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/.
  2. Expand the package (in .zip or .tar.gz format) to the desired installation directory on either the Content Engine server or a server that is mapped or mounted on the Content Engine server.

    For best performance this location should be a local path on the Content Engine server. Specifying a UNC path allows one DITA Open Toolkit location to support multiple DITA rendition engines.The advantage of a shared location is that there is only one location to update with new versions of the DITA Open Toolkit. The disadvantage is that loading the DITA Open Toolkit over the network is slower.

Considerations for installations of DITA Open Toolkit on UNIX systems

Some UNIX installations of the DITA OT have incorrect permission settings for the ant tools. If you get the following error:

2008-09-15T18:46:04.652Z 00D300D3 PUBL FNRCE0000I - INFO DITA OT ERROR>java.io.IOException: ant^@: not found

Verify that file permissions in the DITA-OT/tools/ant/bin directory are set to grant execute privilege.

Considerations for multi-process access to DITA Open Toolkit installations

If you have multiple processes accessing a single DITA Open Toolkit (OT) installation, you might encounter intermittent input and output failures as the DITA Open Toolkit reads the build files. To avoid this problem, each server instance that will perform DITA publishing must have a separate DITA OT installation. If multiple server instances are operating on the same machine, there must be multiple instances of the DITA OT installed, one for each server instance. DITA publishing for each server instance must be configured with the Queue Item Max Dispatchers set to 1, instead of the default value of 2. This results in one publishing thread operating on a separate DITA OT installation.

In this example a cluster has 3 server instances, all operating a single server, and all server instances are to be configured to support DITA publishing.

  1. Install three instances of DITA OT, for example:
    1. C:\DITAOT-S1
    2. C:\DITAOT-S2
    3. C:\DITAOT-S3
  2. Start FileNet Enterprise Manager and configure DITA publishing.
    1. Navigate to the Sites node.
    2. Expand to display server instances under Virtual Servers.
    3. For each server instance:
      1. Right click on a server instance and select Properties.
      2. Click on Publishing tab.
      3. Select the Override inherited setting check box.
      4. Modify Queue Item Max Dispatchers from 2 to 1.
      5. Verify that the DITA Open Toolkit location in the DITA Rendition Engine Connection is unique for this server instance.

Each server instance will have a unique DITA OT location and will have one publishing thread available to use that DITA OT installation.

NOTE  This procedure requires that you do not configure Liquent publishing at the server instance level unless you want Liquent and DITA publishing to share a single publishing thread. Specify Liquent publishing configuration at a higher level then the server instance, for example, the Site level. Here you can specify as many publishing threads as needed for Liquent publishing.