Check Overview

Check Overview

Check gives you assurance that document content that has been converted to a different XML format is intact and that nothing has been lost in the conversion. This quality assurance check is essential for all high-integrity or audited processes where document formats are changed. There are other use cases such as development of publishing pipelines to check that the original content is faithfully transformed to the published format.

For example, Check will check that the content of a DITA document is the same as the Word file from which it was created - whether that process was automatic or manual. It could be used to demonstrate that re-conversion is not needed if the content is the same. If small changes are made to a source document these might be manually applied to the target file to save a complex conversion. Check would demonstrate that the changes are correct by validating the new versions against each other.

Conversion or transformation of a document from one format to another can be time-consuming and expensive as well as error-prone. The ability to check the accuracy of such a process saves manual checking and can save repeating a conversion process when it is not necessary or can be avoided by small edits to the target format.

Check is a time saver for most publishers and essential for publishers that receive new or amended content from outside sources in different formats.

Input Types

Check accepts a number of input types for the conversion checking process.

DITA Map

The DITA map input type allows passing in a complete DITA document composed of multiple map files and DITA files.

This input type requires that you provide all the DITA files including the map and any referenced topics within a ZIP file.

You will also need to specify the path within the ZIP of the map file, e.g. input.ditamap

DOCX

The DOCX input type enables checking a Microsoft Word format document.

This input type accepts only Microsoft Word documents that are in the Office Open XML international standard for Office documents. The file must have the .docx file extension.

For reference, the content we handle is the word/document.xml file found within the .docx input.

XML

The XML input type accepts any non-specific, or generic XML document as input to the conversion checking process.

There is no pre-processing applied to these inputs and they should be standalone: all of the content is contained within the one input file.