Tips for Using XMetal

This tip sheet describes how to remove namespace information and stylesheet declarations from finding aids created in XMetal. These declarations make it easier to work with XMetal 4.0, but they can interfere with OASIS indexing.

If you are using XMetal, there are 2 things that you MUST do before you FTP the finding aid over:

1. Change/make sure the text encoding is UTF-8. Xmetal handles the change well. To do this:
   1. Open the finding aid in plain text view
   2. At the very top, make sure the following is present <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> If not,
      b1) edit the xml declaration so it looks like the above
      b2) Save the file.
      b3) If you have been working with another text encoding, XMetal will alert you that you are changing it. Click YES to save the file.

2. Get rid of the stylesheet declarations and namespace attribute:
   That is,
   1. delete the line "<?xml-stylesheet href="c:/program files/corel/XMetal 4/Author/Assets/Customizable Asset Templates/Style Sheets/ead.css" type="text/css"?>"
   2. and, from the ead element, delete the attribute "xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../Program%20Files/Corel/XMetaL%204/Author/Rules/ead.xsd"" so that "<ead>" has no attributes.

The final text for the top of the document should be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ead>

Just replacing this text isn't enough. You have to make sure that the text encoding change (#1 above) is done correctly when the file is saved. Also, you can change the encoding when you first make a new document, or, if you use a template, you can put this in the template.