Generating revision bars

You can generate revision bars in your PDF output by using the @changebar and @color attributes of the DITAVAL <revprop> element.

The DITA specification for the @changebar attribute of the <revprop> element simply says:

The current version of DITA Open Toolkit uses two <revprop> attribute values to define revision bars:

• The @changebar attribute value defines the style to use for the line. The list of possible values is the same as for other XSL-FO rules (see @change-bar-style). The default value is groove.

• The @color attribute value specifies the change bar color using any color value recognized by XSL-FO, including the usual color names or a hex color value. The default value is black.

DITA-OT uses a default offset of 2 mm to place the revision bar near the edge of the text column. The offset, placement and width are not currently configurable via attribute values.

XSL-FO 1.1 does not provide for revision bars that are not rules, so there is no way to get text revision indicators instead of rules, for example, using a number in place of a rule. Antenna House Formatter provides a proprietary extension to enable this, but the DITA-OT PDF transformation does not take advantage of it.