Hi,
I recently received a message from Mike (sorry I overlooked the message for quite some time
. He asked me how successfull I am with the customisation of the RTF documentation generation. I can change the RTF rather well, but there are some drawbacks. Here are some of these drawbacks and some tips:
- Changing the "Basic Style" doesn't change the output, the default styling is still used. This is annoying, because this field is used as the first set of RTF tags in the generated document, including fonts, predefined styles, headers, page formatting, etc.
- I am able to change some of the document styling using the "Heading 1" style. This style is only used once, namely to format the root package name. This enables me to include many of the "Basic Style" tags in the "Heading 1" style and thereby overriding (some) of the default "Basic Style" tags.
- Changed the "Heading 1" style to show it as a title page.
- Changed the "Heading 1" style to create headers and footers for all of the document.
- Experiment changing the header styles and outlining in all the "Heading x" styles to get your desired leveling of the chapters. I do not have figured out all the RTF generation rules that EA uses, so I cannot give you any specifics here. The only one is this, leaving the "Heading:" field empty in the generation dialog shifts all your packages one up in the outline levels.
- The include tags (e.g. #TEXT#) are used to put any model specific data from the model into the RTF. However, the HTML and RTF tags are different and the RTF tag expanding is less flexible (e.g. the #TEXT# for the "Attribute Line Item" style includes all the details of one attribute). This is, at least for me, a major drawback.
I hope that Sparx will upgrade the RTF generation with the same features and procedures as the HTML now supports. Because as far as I can see, it looks great.
Some more information on RTF tags can be found at the following link:
http://www.cena.dgac.fr/~sagnier/info/formats/rtf/rtfspe15.htm. More (usefull) links are welcome.
I hope we all can work out more details on the current use of the templates and introduce a "wanted list" for the RTF / document generation.
If I remembered it well, Sparx is already working on a generic generation framework (the XSL stylesheets are one good step that I haven't used yet). This framework would be used for code generation, but maybe that same framework can be used for documentation as well?
Good luck to you all and, for Sparx, keep up the good work.
Ps. Sparx: I'm already working on the introduction of EA in more than one company, but therefore I need a good view on your future plans. Could you update the forum "Future plans" section?
