You can directly generate InCopy articles from DITA topics using the XSLT transforms in the org.dita4publishers.dita2indesign plugin. You do not have to use the Open Toolkit to run the transform.

The org.dita4publishers.dita2indesign/xsl directory holds the XSLT transforms used to generate InCopy articles from topics and maps. You can run the transforms directly or run them using the Open Toolkit in order to do all necessary DITA preprocessing (conref resolution, filtering, etc.). For testing purposes it is usually most efficient to run the transforms directly, e.g., in a tool like the oXygen XML editor.

The transforms can generate either the old INCX format or the newer ICML format. For use with InDesign CS5 and newer you must generate the ICML format. For InDesign CS3 and CS4 you must use the INCX format. The INCX format is essentially obsolete and that form of the transforms is not being actively maintained. This discussion only describes generating ICML InCopy articles.

The root transform is topic2articleIcml.xsl. Here the term "article" means "InCopy article" as opposed to "magazine article". This transform manages the generation of one or more InCopy articles from the input topic. The direct output of the transform is an XML manifest file that lists all the InCopy articles generated. The manifest is designed primarily to support the use of the transform from Java code where the Java code needs to know about all the generated InCopy articles.

The core ICML generation is done by the topic2icmlImpl.xsl transform. It's processing a little convoluted because of the need to generate all result documents before generating the manifest. It uses the file elem2styleMapperIcml.xsl as the default element-to-style mapping module. Use this module as the model for your own custom mapping.

By default each input topic results in one InCopy article, reflecting the element-to-style mapping defined in the elem2styleMapperIcml.xsl module. However, you can extend the base transform to generate multiple InCopy articles from a single input topic. You would need to do this for any content that needs to be placed in its own disconnected frame, such as figures, sidebars, pull quotes, and so on.

TBD: Provide sample transform that does this.

TBD: Document general pattern for creating a custom InCopy generation transform

TBD: How to set up the Toolkit-based transform

TBD: Processing a map and its topics