XMetaL integration with ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google Bard advanced text processors powered by AI

ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a GPT-4 large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI.

Bing AI is an artificial intelligence-powered search engine developed by Microsoft and powered by the GPT-4 language model.

Bard is Google's AI chat web service powered by advanced large language model (LLM) PaLM 2.

The integration offers a very powerful set of instruments that significantly reduces writing time and improves documentation quality.

XMetaL allows customers to integrate the ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard web services into the XMetaL environment, following the granting of permission by the customer to utilize this service within their system environment.

The integration provides swift access to the XMetaL editor and ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard tools, enabling seamless data exchange.

ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard can be valuable for technical writers in different ways, including:

• Auto-completing and generating text content based on provided input and selected writing style.

  ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard has been extensively pre-trained to generate content on various documents and texts from diverse sources.

• Improving writing clarity by reviewing and suggesting improvements to sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary, ensuring the content is coherent and accessible.
• Cross-referencing, citations, summarizing, and consistency checks throughout the document.
• Providing explanations to complex concepts concisely.
• Language translation.
• Proofreading by checking spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and inconsistencies.
• Answering technical questions by acting as a quick reference tool.
• Generating initial drafts or ideas for articles, documentation, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), or tutorials.

ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard are integrated into XMetaL Resource Manager.

Integration includes the following features:

• Side-by-side layout with edited documents
• Quick switching between ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard and Active Document views
• Sending ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard instructions and processing responses from active document environment via XMetaL quick navigation commands manager (Ctrl+?)

• Support for GPT instructions templates

  GPT responses depend on instructions format and clarity. Technical writers can define the list of instructions related to specific projects and tasks. Then test the clarity of responses generated by ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard and make adjustments if needed. Instructions can serve as templates for future requests.

  Supported templates parameters are:

  • Active document selected text
  • Active document ancestor element content for the word under the cursor
  • Document content
  • Text selected in ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard response window
  • Clipboard content

  For complex instruction preprocessing, customers can develop and run XMetaL customization scrips.

  Instructions templates can be exported or imported using text file formats.

• Support for GPT response processing templates

  Text generated by ChatGPT/Bing AI/Google Bard can be inserted into the active document as the parameter value in a predefined XML fragment template.

  Supported templates parameters are:

  • The selected text in the response
  • The last response
  • The response containing the selection
  • Clipboard content

  For complex response postprocessing, customers can develop and run XMetaL customization scrips.

Integration was developed and implemented as XMetaL customization in the XMetaL Developer environment. XMetaL customers can develop similar integrations with other web services powered by AI.

XMetaL integration with Grammarly online web writing assistant

Grammarly is an advanced online writing web assistant for proofreading and editing documents. Grammarly checks for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, provides rephrasing suggestions, and enhances vocabulary usage. The latest GrammrlyGO extension is a generative AI tool that enables quick composition, rewriting, and generating new ideas, along with offering personalized and relevant suggestions.

Grammarly web assistant is integrated into XMetaL Resource Manager.

The integration provides swift access to the XMetaL editor and Grammarly tools, enabling seamless data exchange.

Integration includes the following features:

• Side-by-side layout with edited documents
• Quick switching between Grammarly and Active Document views
• Supported text processing scopes in Grammarly:

  • Process active document.
  • Process active document selected fragment.
  • Write new text content.
• Passing Grammarly commands and saving processed text from active document environment via XMetaL quick navigation commands manager (Ctrl+?)
• Document and document fragment post-processing commands:

  • Replace active document original content.
  • Replace the active document XML element corresponding to the element selected in the spell-checker view.
• New text or new text fragment processing commands:

  • Insert text to the new element.
  • Append text to the selected element.
  • Replace selected element content with new text.
  • Paste text to the selected location.
• Additional tools allow showing/hiding XML markup tags and synchronizing selections in the active document and spell-checker view.

XMetaL Git Integration

Git is distributed version control system.

The XMetaL Git Integration feature includes a built-in Git Client designed to assist regular content authors in managing the history of file content using Git.

Suppose you are an experienced Git user and require advanced functionalities like cherry-pick, patches, sub-modules, sub-trees, and git-flow. In that case, it is recommended to utilize a dedicated Git client, which you most likely already use.

Before utilizing this feature, it is advisable to read the XMetaL Git Integration Help document for guidance.

Integration with DITA-OT 4.0.2

DITA Open Toolkit Release 4.0.2 includes a new plug-in for easier PDF customization, project file improvements, updates to LwDITA processing, and support for the split chunking feature in the latest drafts of the upcoming DITA 2.0 standard.

• The new PDF theme plug-in extends the default PDF2 plug-in with a new theme parameter. The "--theme" option of plug-in takes a path to a theme file and changes the styling of the PDF output without requiring changes to XSLT style sheets.

  Themes can be used to adjust basic settings like cover page images, page sizes, numbering, font properties, background colors and borders, spacing, and running content like page headers and footers.

• Project file improvements allow:

  • Common publications are to be defined in one place, re-used in others, and overlaid with local variations when the common settings need to be adjusted in some instances.
  • Publications to define filter criteria that are applied to the content of the individual publication (in addition to those specified for the entire deliverable context).
• Lightweight DITA and Markdown updates:

  • The org.lwdita plug-in has been updated to version 3.3, which includes Markdown processing improvements.

    • DITA-OT 4.0 includes processing updates to reflect recent changes to the latest drafts of the LwDITA profile from OASIS.
    • Add support for Markdown files without first-level headings
    • Better support for Python-Markdown Attribute Lists
    • Markdown input improvements

• Updated DITA 2.0 preview, in addition to supporting provided in previous releases (3.5, 3.6, and 3.7), includes updated processing support for the latest drafts of the DITA 2.0 DTD and RELAX NG grammar files from OASIS.

XMetaL Styling Assistant

XMetaL Styling Assistant allows you to add/overwrite new CSS styles to existing active document customization or generate new default CSS styles. Users can switch between "user-defined" and "default customizations".

XMetaL Styling Assistant allows users with initial knowledge of CSS editing to change active document selected element styles: text font family, size, style, weight, color, decoration, background, alignment, display style, whitespace, etc.

Improved DITA Map editor

With the XMetaL Author Enterprise 18.0, users can now access new actions within the Map Editor. These actions offer additional functionality and features, expanding the capabilities of the Map Editor tool. New and improved DITA Map operations include:

The Map Editor UI has been updated to utilize the Microsoft WebView2 control. The Context menu window is confined within the boundary of the Resource Manager.

Support of integration with Microsoft Edge

XMetaL 18.0 installation contains XMEdge ActiveX control that can be embedded into the Active Document as a viewer for an image or referenced content.

New CTM Properties

In XMetaL 18.0, two CTM properties have been introduced to assist in configuring how attribute values are displayed in the attribute inspector. These properties offer enhanced capabilities for customization and control.

• Attribute Value Space Property:

  • The attribute value space property provides fixed values, pre-defined values, hints, templates, or attribute constraints without modifying DTDs.
  • It consists of a collection of pre-defined attribute values specified in a CTM file displayed in the Attribute Inspector. This feature can be applied to any XML attribute type, although it is commonly used for attributes with a CDATA type. Ensuring that all configured attribute values conform to the DTD is essential.
• Attribute Pinned Lists Property:

  • The Attribute Pinned Lists Property allows authors to customize a selected set of attributes that will consistently appear at the top of the Attribute Inspector.
  • The pinned attributes are displayed first in the order specified in CTM for an element. The remaining attributes are then shown in alphabetical order.

Known issues of integrations with ChatGPT, Bing AI 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.

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.

Shortcut key doesn't work after moving focus to Map Editor with XMetaL Navigator

Shortcut key doesn't do anything after moving focus into the Map Editor using the XMetaL Navigator feature. To work around this, please press the <Tab> key once and try your keyboard shortcut again. If it still doesn't work repeat pressing <Tab> key and trying your shortcut key until you get some action.

WebHelp output's Print function doesn't work for local files

When opening a local copy of the WebHelp output into a web browser, especially Google Chrome, clicking the "Print" button results in no action. This behavior is typically the result of a web browser's "same-origin" security model for local files versus files loaded over http.

This behavior can be worked around by running a local web server or deploying the WebHelp webhelp_out folder's contents to a web server and navigating your browser to that web server location.

When using DITA 1.3 XML schemas, reusable component feature is disabled

XMetaL's reusuble component feature has not been setup for the DITA 1.3 XSDs. As a result, related menu items like Reuse > Create Reusable Component are disabled.

WebDAV lock cannot be obtained for document just opened

When a document is opened from a WebDAV server into XMetaL Author Enterprise, an error message maybe displayed stating that the WebDAV lock could not be obtained. This issue is due to the DITA MapEditor feature preprocessing the document's XML with our XMetaL XML processor (XMXML). XMXML contains a lot of the same code as XMetaL Author including the WebDAV locking logic and as such, XMXML ends up obtaining the WebDAV lock first.

To work around this issue, the DITA options must be changed so that ditamap files open into the XML view by default. To change this setting, select the Tools > Options... menu item and select the DITA category's Map Editor tab. On the Map Editor tab, adjust the "Open DITA maps in the:" drop-down list so that "XML view" is selected. Click OK to accept the changes and restart XMetaL.

Note: The DITA feature does not support WebDAV out-of-the-box. A WebDAV capable XMetaL connector is required to use the DITA feature with a WebDAV server.

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.