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Customizable presentation layers

You can customize application menus, application skins, and XSL styles for content.

Application menus

The application menus determine which menus are displayed in the menu bar. These menus are stored as a set of XML files. Each menu has a list of children with a name and a JavaScript function to call when activated.

Application skins

In each collection, you can specify the application skin for display on a standard monitor, tablet, and touch screen monitor. The skin determines the HTML structure and layout of the user interface, and the images to use. All publications within a collection are displayed using the skin specified for it in the app.skin_name configuration option in the wietmsd.xml configuration file.

By default, these configuration items point to the skin delivered by SDL. To use a customized skin, edit the wietmsd.xml configuration file, setting the value of the appropriate option to the name of the desired skin.

All skins directories are stored in a skins folder. Each skin has its own directory, with two subdirectories, images and templates.

XSL styles for content

XSL stylesheets transform your technical content (in XML format) into useful HTML or PDFs for your users. XSL stylesheets are stored in a styles/ directory. You can find some commonly used styles in the common/ and FullSupport/ subdirectories of this directory, and you can create separate subdirectories for the styles of each specification, such as s1000d/ or mil_38784/.

To customize stylesheets without modifying the original XSL, add a customization to the stylesheet called user.xsl in the form of an xsl:template element with a priority attribute set to the value 10. Doing so overrides the corresponding template in the original stylesheet.