Documentation Center

New publish flow extended

The new publish flow introduced in Knowledge Center 13 to publish to Dynamic Delivery has now been extended to all the other formats and platforms. Publishing to PDF, CHM, WebHelp and so on is now plugin-based.

Benefits

The benefits of the new publish flow now applies to all formats and platforms:
  • Considerably improved performance
  • Easier to automate
  • Easier to maintain and debug
  • More resistant to product upgrade

New and improved

The process itself has been improved, and new functionality have been added.

What we added and changed:
  • A new Publish configuration item in the Settings tab and XML Settings subtab of Organize Space: XML Publish Plug-Ins. It contains all the publish process XML for all output formats, and is the reference location to find information about the sequence of plugins that are involved in the publishing of a given format.
  • The possibility to raise different event types for a better error handling.
  • The hyperlink/link syntax section is now in the publish configuration and no longer in the background task configuration.
  • Better functionality for <compare>, including pre-processing.
What we improved:
  • Better interaction with the background tasks
  • Shorter export paths
  • The fallback language behavior, including its interaction with the image resolution.
  • Richer <features> in the Publish configuration for conditional filtering.
  • Clearer handler structure in the Publish configuration XML.
  • Better <sequence> structure, in the XML, when interacting with <compare> and <combine>.
  • Better retry system: it can be configured differently depending on the type of exception.

The process changes requires that you recompile depending on which plugins you have used: find all details in the API section.

All details are provided
  • about the process in the Content Manager customizing publishing chapter.
  • about the plugins in the Content Manager API section.

Change of behavior for image resolutions management during publish

The new publishing process reinstated one aspect of the publishing behavior that was faulty in earlier versions.

All resolutions specified in the Resolutions property of the Add Output Format form should exist and have a released status before a publication output may acquire the Release Candidate status. However, previous performance optimizations allowed that:
  • When a list of image resolutions (for example: High, Low) were specified in the Resolutions field , the resolutions beside the first one were used as fallback resolutions during publishing.
  • When the output format language was the same as the Working language of the publication version, a publication output could be Release Candidate if only one of the resolutions in the list was found released.

The fallback behavior no longer stands in this version. You can find a detailed description of the corrected publishing process (selection and export phases) in Version, language and resolution selection for publishing.