XMetaL's S1000D customization

The S1000D specification is an international standard for the procurement and production of technical documentation. It is an XML-based framework designed to prepare, manage, and publish technical information for various products. Initially developed by the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD), S1000D is widely used in defense systems, civil aviation, and other industries to ensure consistency and interoperability in technical publications.

XMetaL's S1000D customization offers a suite of specialized functionalities designed for the efficient manipulation of S1000D documents stored on the local file system. These tools facilitate the editing, validation, and management of S1000D content, streamlining the process of creating and maintaining compliant technical documentation.

The customization includes the following features.

• Support S1000D version 6.
• Create drafts or issues of S1000D documents.
• Support default project configuration in Common Source File Base(CSFB).
• Support filtering in CSFB panel.
• Purge unused ICN entities in a S1000D document.
• Provide actions to manipulate change marks.
• Provide actions to manipulate change, security and control attributes
• Provide actions to select, insert and manipuate hotspots.
• Provide specific UI to select S1000D documents.
• Provide context menu to show help on the current element.
• Provide context menu to insert cross references.
  • condRef
  • footnoteRef
  • internalRef
• Provide context menu to insert S1000D data module files.
  • commentRef
  • dmRef
  • ddnRef
  • dmlRef
  • pmRef
• Provide context menu to insert file references
  • attachmentRef
  • externalPubRef
  • infoEntityRef
• Provide support to incorporate Common Information Repository(CIR) documents in a project.
• Provide actions to insert, edit and display CIR references in a S1000D document.
• Graphic and Multimedia Handling: Manage graphic and multimedia elements within S1000D documents.
• Reference Element Management: Efficiently handle reference elements such as <dmRef>, <figureRef>, and <pubRef>, ensuring correct linkage and structure.
• Referenced Target Validation: Check the targets referenced by <dmRef>, <figureRef>, and <pubRef> elements to ensure accuracy and consistency.
• CSDB-like View: Provide a user interface that resembles a Common Source Database (CSDB), allowing users to access and interact with S1000D documents stored locally on the file system.
• Folder-Based Project Management: Implement a folder-based project mechanism to manage various worksets of S1000D documents, enhancing organization and accessibility.
• Schema-Based Styling: Style S1000D documents based on their XML Schema, ensuring that formatting aligns with standard specifications.
• XML Element Locator Tool: Provide a tool to efficiently find and insert valid S1000D XML elements into documents. Users can search by element name or description, ensuring correct placement and adherence to S1000D standards.
• S1000D Data Dictionary Viewer: Incorporate a viewer within the editor, enabling users to access detailed descriptions of selected S1000D elements from the official data dictionary. This feature clarifies element usage, supports accurate and consistent technical publications, and ensures compliance with industry standards.

XMetaL integration with leading AI assistants, including xAI's Grok, High-Flyer's DeepSeek, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini.

With just a few keyboard or mouse clicks, a technical writer can send a predefined instruction to the AI assistant, using document element content or selected text as part of the prompt. The AI-generated response can then be inserted into the document, either replacing the original content or adding new elements.

The key advantages of providing fast access to and simultaneously using multiple AI assistants—such as Grok, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini—by sending the same instruction to all of them:

• Diverse Perspectives Each AI assistant is trained on different datasets and may use different algorithms or reasoning strategies, providing varied interpretations, suggestions, or responses to the same instruction.
• Improved Accuracy and Validation Comparing responses helps validate facts, identify inconsistencies, and cross-check the correctness of information, improving overall confidence in the output.
• Content Quality Optimization Different assistants may excel in specific tasks (e.g., clarity, creativity, brevity). Reviewing outputs side-by-side enables selection or combination of the best elements from each.
• Broader Use Case Coverage Some assistants are better suited for technical writing, coding, summarization, or specific domain expertise. Using multiple ensures broader support for various tasks.
• Resilience and Redundancy If one assistant produces an unsatisfactory or unusable response, others may still provide valuable results, reducing reliance on a single tool.
• Benchmarking and Evaluation Enables continuous performance comparison of AI tools to evaluate which best meets user or organizational needs over time.
• Customization and Flexibility Responses can be tailored by selecting the assistant that aligns best with tone, depth, or target audience preferences.

By leveraging multiple AI assistants simultaneously, users benefit from enhanced productivity, deeper insight, and higher-quality outcomes.

AI assistants designed to deliver exceptional versatility across a broad spectrum of tasks, including:

• Natural Language Understanding and Generation: AI assistants comprehends and responds to human language with accuracy and fluency, facilitating effective communication.
• Creative Writing: It excels in generating creative text formats, including poems, stories, and scripts, showcasing a high level of linguistic creativity.
• Translation: AI assistants offers highly accurate translations across multiple languages, enhancing cross-linguistic communication.
• Summarization: It efficiently condenses lengthy texts into concise and coherent summaries, improving information accessibility.
• AI assistants's capabilities make it a powerful tool with wide-ranging applications in research, education, business, and beyond.

Following features make AI assistants an invaluable tool for technical writers, enhancing productivity, accuracy, and content quality:

• Automatically generates and completes text based on user input and the selected writing style, streamlining the writing process. Leveraging its extensive pre-training on diverse documents and texts, AI assistants provides relevant content generation across various domains.
• Reviews and suggests improvements to sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary to ensure content is clear, coherent, and accessible.
• Simplifies complex topics by providing clear and concise explanations.
• Facilitates accurate translation of content between different languages.
• Checks for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and inconsistencies, enhancing the overall quality of the text.
• Acts as a quick reference tool, answering technical questions efficiently.
• Assists in generating initial drafts or ideas for articles, documentation, FAQs, and tutorials.

The XMetaL integration with AI assistants provides an effective suite of tools that substantially reduces writing time and improves documentation quality. XMetaL enables customers to integrate AI assistants web services within the XMetaL environment, subject to customer authorization. This integration enhances XMetaL's functionality by granting access to AI assistants’s advanced capabilities, allowing users to leverage its power while maintaining compliance with internal policies and security requirements. Additionally, it offers quick access to AI assistants tools directly within the XMetaL editor, ensuring seamless data exchange and a streamlined user experience.

AI assistants are integrated into the XMetaL Resource Manager, offering the following features:

• The system enables a side-by-side layout of edited documents, facilitating efficient workflow.
• Users can seamlessly switch between AI assistants and XMetaL Document views, enhancing productivity.
• Instructions can be sent and responses processed directly within the active document environment using XMetaL macro calls, such as:
  • Send XChat instruction: (Shortcut: Ctrl+\)
  • Process XChat response: (Shortcut: Ctrl+])
  • XMetaL Quick Navigation Commands Manager (Ctrl+?): Allow for streamlined navigation.
  • XMetaL context menu: Provide further access to these features, ensuring a smooth and integrated user experience.

• Support for instruction templates enables users to standardize their processes and enhance the efficiency of content creation.

  The quality of AI assistants’s responses is influenced by the clarity and structure of the instructions given. XMetaL includes over 50 predefined text-processing commands, such as “Describe and provide details,” “Improve text quality and clarity,” and “Summarize.” Users can customize this command set by adding or removing commands to suit their specific requirements. Technical writers can develop detailed instructions tailored to particular projects, test the responses, and refine them as needed. These optimized instructions can then be used as templates for future requests, ensuring consistent and high-quality outputs.

  The supported template parameters include:

  • Active document selected text
  • Content of the active document's ancestor element for the word under the cursor
  • Document content
  • Text selected in the AI assistants response window
  • Clipboard content
• Support for XChat response processing templates allows text generated by AI assistants to be inserted into the active document as a parameter value within a predefined XML fragment template, ensuring proper placement and consistency.

  The supported template parameters include:

  • The selected text in the response
  • The last response
  • The response containing the selection
  • Clipboard content
• The document text sent as an instruction parameter is highlighted for easy visual reference. This highlighting also applies to AI assistants responses inserted into the document, ensuring clear visibility and easy identification.
• Depending on user preferences or the stage of documentation development, both keyboard input and mouse can be used. Users can type text in XMetaL, send instructions to AI assistants, and process responses (such as adding or removing text or XML fragments) using only the keyboard. This flexibility promotes a more efficient and streamlined workflow, accommodating various working styles and needs.

Integration was developed and implemented as a customization within the XMetaL Developer environment. XMetaL customers have the capability to create similar integrations with other AI-powered web services.

XML markup templates

Technical writers can locate, preview, and insert predefined XML content fragments into a document with a few simple keyboard or mouse clicks.

XMetaL Author 20.0 streamlines the creation, management, and distribution of XML markup templates. Authors can convert existing document fragments or define new, pre-populated XML content that meets company policies, including formats for tables, lists, steps, and other common structures. For efficient management, templates can be organized by type, and a context-sensitive search tool allows authors to quickly find, preview, and insert them into XML documents.

The combined use of XML markup templates and XMetaL's document template features, which provide predefined structures for new documents, greatly reduces production time while ensuring adherence to company documentation policies and standards.

Embedded CTM Editor and enhanced Styling Assistant

The CTM Editor, now integrated into the XMetaL editing environment, allows users to view, modify, and customize a wide range of element-based behaviors and properties for a specific Active Document DTD or schema. These settings may originate from XMetaL Developer or be automatically generated.

The Styling Assistant Editor enables users to modify the visual styles of selected elements in the active document, including font family, size, style, weight, color, decoration, background, alignment, display, and whitespace.

Within the WYSIWYG environment of XMetaL Author, users can easily locate and adjust properties for selected elements. Saved changes are automatically reflected in the active document.

This functionality supports both advanced XMetaL customization developers and regular users looking to quickly adjust the editing environment to their immediate needs.

CTM Editor supports configuration of the following element properties:

Styling Assistant Editor capabilities include:

• Add new styles for selected elements.
• Select applicable CSS selectors for the active document’s selected elements.
• Copy, paste, delete, and reorder styles.
• Edit styles directly in text mode.
• Import styles from default customizations or external CSS files.
• Add and navigate @import statements.
• Synchronize attribute values of selected elements with CSS rules via a wizard.
• Locate selectors using the element name or attributes.
• Generate default CSS based on existing CTM rules.
• Reveal the selected CSS file in Windows Explorer.
• Open CSS files using the default or preferred editor.
• Reload current CSS customizations.
• Apply CSS changes across all open XMetaL documents.
• Restore selectors from the original or session’s first saved file.

MathML support

MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is an XML-based markup language used for descriMicrosoft Copilot mathematical notation and its content. It's an open standard developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to natively integrate mathematical formulas into web pages and other documents.

XMetaL 20.0 provides enhanced support for creating and editing MathML elements. Key features include:

• Seamless Inline Display: Mathematical formulas are displayed as inline graphics directly within XML documents.
• Intuitive Editing: Integration with MathLive (free open source) or MathType (commercial license is required) editors allows for easy content creation and modification.
• Flexible Viewing: Users can toggle between the XML tag view and a graphical view. The graphical view also offers options to zoom in/out and adjust the default element size.

This functionality benefits a wide range of users—including technical writers, companies, and educational and scientific organizations—by simplifying the creation of high-quality mathematical content.

Enhancing customer experience

XMetaL enhances the user experience of its XML editor by enabling technical writers to focus on document semantics, while simplifying or abstracting the complexity of markup handling.

• Enhanced User Interface

  XMetaL Project utilities, like cross-file operations and reference insertion, are implemented as modeless floating dialogs. Integrations with various AI tools (Grok, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini), web browsers, Grammarly, and bookmark managers appear as separate tabs in the XMetaL Resources Manager. This design allows users to set parameters for these tools by selecting text or markup within an open document, and run utilities without having to close the dialog boxes. To make the process even clearer, content passed as a parameter is highlighted in the active document.

• Streamlined AI Integration

  Users can send the same instructions to multiple AI services simultaneously (Grok, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Gemini) and choose the best response. Instruction templates also accept selected text from AI-generated responses as parameters, which simplifies the research process. For example, a template like "Describe, provide more details: <selected text>" can be applied with a single click.

• Efficient Access to Commands

  Depending on the stage of the documentation process, users can access utilities via keyboard macros or a context popup menu. The "Quick access to all available commands" feature (Ctrl+?) allows users to find specific utilities by name or description. The content of the context popup menu is determined by the utilities listed in the Resources Manager and its current state. The Inserting Elements utility (Ctrl+Enter) allows users to quickly find and select specific elements by name or description. For optimal use, the "element short description" field should be configured for specific DTDs or Schemas; this is pre-configured for S1000D.

By simplifying XML editing and optimizing research and document creation, XMetaL significantly enhances the performance and productivity of technical writers.

XMetaL Core Enhancements

This release includes improvements to the core components of XMetaL, delivering enhanced performance, stability, and scalability. These enhancements optimize the overall user experience, improve support for complex XML editing scenarios, and lay the foundation for future feature development and integration.

XMetaL binaries have been updated to ensure seamless integration with the latest Windows SDKs and Visual Studio development tools, providing full compatibility with recent updates to Windows 10 and 11. This release includes critical security enhancements, optimized installation with reduced size and setup time, and functionality improvements based on direct customer feedback.

Various customer feature requests and defect fixes are addressed

Known issues of integrations with ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google Gemini web services

Integration with web services relies on a stable internet connection. Due to the high volume of requests, web service responses can be delayed, user interface reactions slowed down or web service hangs. In this case, the recommendation are:

• Reload the web service.
• Close-reopen the web service integration tab in XMetaL.
• Log off from the service account then log in again.

Known issues of integrations with Grammarly web service

Integration with Grammarly relies on a stable internet connection. Due to the high volume of requests, web service responses can be delayed, user interface reactions slowed down or Grammarly hangs. In this case, the recommendation are:

• Close-reopen the Grammarly integration tab in XMetaL.
• Log off from the Grammarly account then log in again.
• In some cases, the Grammarly Desktop application should be shut down and then restarted again. Some of symptoms that require this action are

  • Grammarly doesn't replace spell checker content in Resource Manager with suggestions text.
  • Grammarly suggestions window doesn't appear when the mouse hovers over Grammarly highlighted word.

Known issues of integrations with DeepSeek web service

XMetaL is configured to enable scrollbars in DeepSeek by default. However, DeepSeek does not apply this setting on displays with lower resolutions. The following workarounds can be used:

• Click inside the DeepSeek interface to set focus, then use the TAB key to navigate to the required field.
• Click inside the DeepSeek interface to set focus, then use Ctrl + Plus/Minus to adjust the zoom level.

Tools > Options dialog accelerators don't work sometimes

Some property pages within the new unified options dialog won't respond to keyboard shortcuts until focus is moved into the embedded XFT form that is on the active property page. This limitation relates to Windows' handling of embedded ActiveX controls.

The x64 Cameras In Focus and Meeting Minutes samples have some features that don't work

A few of the Cameras In Focus and Meeting Minutes sample's features rely upon Microsoft components that do not have an x64 equivalent (e.g. MSScript.ocx, MSCAL1.ocx). Yet other features rely upon a x64 version of Microsoft Word to be installed on the computer. In the x64 version of the software, these samples have been removed from the Help > Samples submenu to avoid issues. You can still invoke either samples template but please use caution when running these samples as they may not gracefully degrade when invoking features with a dependency on these 3^rd party items.

Built-in toolbar auto-layout on first launch

When XMetaL Author is started for the first time, the built-in toolbars will each be docked on a separate row. Custom DTD-specific toolbars will be docked more efficiently (i.e. multiple per row) providing there is enough horizontal space to do so. Once toolbars have been reorganized (by dragging them around), their positions will be remembered. This vertically oriented auto-layout for built-in toolbars will also take effect any time the XMetaL Author workspace is reset, which is done by holding the Ctrl key down at startup.

Child submenus/menu items not copied when moving top-level menu buttons

Moving top-level menu buttons will not copy the child submenus or menu items. Similarly, moving submenu items will not duplicate those child items.