SPFE Documentation | Collections > SPFE Development > Synthesis

Synthesis

Synthesis is the first stage in the SPFE build process. The job of the synthesis stage is to create a collection of fully resolved topic files as input to the presentation process. Fully resolved means:

• All conditions have been applied.

• All strings and fragments have been resolved.

• All syntactic sugar elements have been transformed to their general equivalents. For instance the note, caution, and warning admonitions have been transformed into admonition elements with the appropriate signal word.

• All subject affinities have been fully resolved.

The synthesis stage also includes the extract and merge operations, for those cases where content is being extracted from source files, and (where applicable) being merged with authored content to create complete topics.

Additionally, the synthesis stage generates link catalogs and toc files which are used by the presentation stage to link and organize content.