Publishing Engine

You can generate Google Structured Data in the DITA WebHelp Responsive output. Google uses structured data to better understand the contents of the page and display special search results in a Google Search. For details about how to do this, see How to Generate Google Structured Data.

It is possible to display a custom title for topics in the search results page. This can be achieved by adding the <searchtitle> element inside the particular DITA topic (or inside the topic reference within a DITA map). The <searchtitle> element is used to specify the title that is displayed by search tools that locate the topic. For more details, see How to Display Custom Title in Search Results.

Scaling when working with image maps was improved. Adding the @scale attribute on the <imagemap> element now scales both the image and its areas, if defined.

A new transformation parameter (webhelp.skip.main.page.generation) can be set to true to instruct the transformation engine to skip the default main page generation. This is helpful if you want to replace the default main page with a topic page or other custom page.

It is possible to implement a custom search filter by referencing a custom JavaScript file in an Oxygen Publishing Template. For details on how to do this, see How to Implement a Custom Search Filter.

The search expressions that you type in the search filter field are now preserved after you click on a search result. This makes it more efficient to refine searches since you can edit or add text to the preserved search expression instead of starting over.

A new transformation parameter (webhelp.fragment.custom.search.engine.script) can be used to specify the path to an XHTML file that contains scripts required for a custom search engine that would replace WebHelp's built-in search engine. For more details, see How to Configure a Custom Search Engine.

A new transformation parameter (webhelp.search.default.operator) makes it possible to change the default operator for the search engine. If the value is set to and, multiple word queries result in the search engine only returning results for topics that contain ALL words. If the value is set to or (default value), multiple word queries result in the search engine returning results for topics that contain ANY of the words.

The break-before, break-inside, and break-after CSS properties are now supported in PDF transformations. They are used to control how page, column, or region breaks behave before, inside, or after a generated box.

For CSS-based PDF transformations, a new -pdf-a transformation parameter can be used to make PDF documents archive-able. The possible values are: PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u, PDF/A-3a, PDF/A-3b, PDF/A-3u. For more details, see Chemistry User Guide: Archiving.

For CSS-based PDF output, a new filter.unused.glossentries parameter can be set to yes to filter the glossary to only display referenced glossary entries in the output. If the parameter is set to no (the default), all glossary entries are displayed.

The CSS-based PDF processor now supports custom string values for the list-style-type CSS property defined in the CSS for list items.

Exception elements are now taken into consideration to correct issues in hyphenation dictionaries. For information about how to define exceptions, see How to Define Hyphenation for a Specific Word.

A new -oxy-break-line-at-hyphens property can be used to control whether line breaks are forced or avoided at hyphens (you can also use auto for its value to hyphenate automatically according to the hyphenation dictionary's algorithm). This property replaces the deprecated -oxy-avoid-breaking-line-at-hyphens property (although that property can still be used). For more details, see How to Force or Avoid Line Breaks at Hyphens.

The new -oxy-pdf-table-omit-header-at-break and -oxy-pdf-table-omit-footer-at-break properties can be set to true to omit the header or footer from tables when a page break occurs.

Scaling when working with image maps was improved. Adding the @scale attribute on the <imagemap> element now scales both the image and areas.

The new -oxy-foreground-image property can be used to display an image (raster/PNG or vector/SVG) above the text (in the foreground) of a document. An example of a common use-case is to use it to display a watermark message (e.g. Draft, Copyright, or Do not copy).

By default, the publishing engine now reports errors if RNG-based topics or maps are invalid according to the associated schema.

Syntax highlights now appear in the output when publishing DITA codeblocks that contain YAML content.

Updated the Apache FOP library to version 2.7.

Updated the Apache Batik toolkit to version 1.15.

Updated the Apache PDFBox library to version 2.0.24.

The DITA Open Toolkit version that is bundled with the Oxygen Publishing Engine has been updated to version 3.7.3.

Updated the third-party Jackson library to version 2.13.2 and the jackson-databind library to version 2.13.2.2 to help prevent vulnerability issues.