Converting Documents from DOCX to DITA in Oxygen XML Editor

Oxygen XML Editor

Today's lesson is concerned with the Oxygen XML Editor. Oxygen (or "oXygen," if you're being fancy) is a full-featured desktop application that provides a wide-range of XML and DITA authoring tools. I'm looking for work as a Technical Writer, and it is my understanding that Oxygen is an application used by modern companies for a variety of content authoring purposes. In this blog, I'll take Oxygen for a test drive.

In my previous lesson, I used Python to access the underlying XML in a DOCX file I'd created. While it was not a complex process to access the XML in the file, the presentation of that code was difficult to understand for me as a coding novice. Oxygen will hopefully provide a more user-friendly interface.

After opening Oxygen, I navigated to Tools > Batch Document Converter. As this was my first time using Oxygen, the converter was not yet installed. This is the appropriate tool to convert a DOCX file to something Oxygen can parse, so I installed the converter.

After restarting the application, I navigated to File > Import/Convert > Additional conversions > Word to DITA. I selected my DOCX file, turned on all the checkmarks, and hit Convert. Oyxgen created a DITA map from my document — since I had that option checked.

This map helpfully organized my file into a nested structure. The individual topics of the DOCX lecture were broken down into individual DITA files, with a DITAMAP file that coordinated their structure. Oxygen understood the hierarchy of headings and styles in the original document.

Oxygen also correctly imported the images and links in the document. You can see the benefit of working with data in a structured authoring tool compared to reading raw code in a text editor or an IDE.

The images I've inserted into my file are a little wide. If I click on the image, I see that I can access the image's attributes in the Attributes view. Using the "width" attribute, I can reduce the width of the image's representation in the document. I'll change the caption text for the images to italic case using Ctrl+I on PC or Command+I on Mac.

If I switch the Tags Display Mode to Full Tags, the link tags in my document unwrap to reveal the URLs I'd embedded in the DOCX file's copy. I thought I might need to apply some finesse to import the links in my document, but Oxygen handled it.

I'll try using Full Tags mode as I append more copy to my file. I add another "p" tag at the bottom of the imported document and begin to add more copy.

Right away, I understand why this editor is popular among XML and DITA editors. There is a great deal of flexibility offered in how content is presented by the editor, with a painless import procedure that seems to do most of the work for you.

So now I have two methods to work with XML. While I could already access my lecture content as code, now I can use this handy structured interface.