Publishing overview
Publishing is a tool that allows you to create a replica of a document. The replica, known as the publication document, can have its own security and property settings, as well as a different format than the source document, such as HTML or PDF.
The publication document:
- Can continue to exist after the source document has been deleted.
- Can be automatically deleted when the source document is deleted.
- Is not changed when the source document is changed.
- Can exist in a different folder than the source document.
- Can have a different file format than the source document:
- For Rendition Engine, the source document might be one of many formats (such as Word®, Excel®, or PowerPoint®) and the publication documentation is either HTML or PDF.
- For DITA Rendition Engine, the source document is a collection of DITA components and the publication document is a PDF document.
You can also choose to publish a document many times, and set different options on each of the generated publication documents.
Limitations
Before publishing source documents, consider the following limitations:
- You cannot publish document files with built-in or native passwords to HTML or PDF format because the Rendition Engine does not process password-protected documents, including sheets in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Publishing a document with a built-in password can cause the Rendition Engine to become unstable.
- Rendition Engine does not render Microsoft Word source documents that contain the AutoOpen macro fields. Confirm that your Word source document does not include AutoOpen macro fields before attempting to generate PDF files.
- You can create a PDF file from a Microsoft Word document that contains secured or protected fields. However, IBM cannot guarantee that any transformation options you have selected will work. Word documents that contain secured or protected fields can be successfully rendered to PDF, but features such as bookmarks and links might not work.
- Microsoft Project renditions might contain more pages than you expected from the original source document. The pages that are rendered depend on what was displayed in the Microsoft Project window when you last saved the document. To avoid additional pages, you must save the Microsoft Project source file with only the desired information displayed.
- Rendition Engine renders blank Microsoft Word documents, that is,Word documents that are either entirely empty, or contain only a header or footer or only an image.
- Rendition Engine cannot render a document that has links to other documents or graphic files. Links to other documents or files must be disabled.
- Microsoft Word allows you to create bookmarks to hidden text. If you deactivate hidden text and then render a document, such bookmarks still appear in the rendered document. Consequently, because the hidden text (containing the targets for such bookmarks) is excluded, some or all of the bookmarks can reference the wrong pages.
- When using a reference as a field code in a Microsoft Word document, the reference is rendered by the Render business service as a hyperlink, and the link color matches what is defined for preserved internal table of content links in the Word content type.
- Rendition Engine does not resolve hyperlinks in Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, or Project documents.
- When rendering Microsoft Excel documents to HTML format, sometimes a hidden error dialog is generated by the Excel plug-in, warning that the data conversion feature will not be saved in the HTML file. BusinessServiceRender does not properly handle this dialog and the rendition job fails.
- When printing a Microsoft Excel file containing multiple sheets, you can print page numbers in the header or footer in sequential order across all the sheets in the workbook. However, the rendered output of the same workbook results in the page numbers starting over for each sheet. With Rendition Engine, you can render an entire workbook, but the pagination is not preserved in the PDF output.
Publishing components
Publishing consists of the following components:
- Publishing Style Template Manager
- The Publishing Style Template Manager is installed along with Enterprise Manager and is used to manage publish style templates.
- Publishing Designer
- A Workplace applet responsible for designing publish templates.
- Publish Document Wizard
- A Workplace wizard that opens when the Publish action is made on a document
- Publishing Handler
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The Content Engine Publishing code contains the Publishing Handler, which is used to process publish requests in the publishing queue.
- Rendition Engine
- Two types of rendition engines are supported, the Rendition Engine that uses the Liquent® Enterprise Services for rendering and the DITA Rendition Engine that uses the DITA Open Toolkit for rendering.