Monthly Archives: March 2010

Myth #2: FrameMaker is only appropriate for printed books

While it is true that FrameMaker excels at the creation of printed content and PDF files, there is absolutely no reason that it should be limited to the creation of chapter-based and book-centric content. FrameMaker works with files, you get to decide what those files represent .. books, chapters, sections, topics, or snippets. For years, people have been using FrameMaker along with tools like Mif2Go, WebWorks, and others, to create both PDF/print output as well as numerous online formats. In those workflows, people generally authored in unstructured, chapter-based files.

With the growing popularity of XML (and DITA in particular), FrameMaker can still be used to author content in a chapter-oriented paradigm, but it can also be used to author individual topics just as easily as any other XML editor. Using DITA maps to organize the topic files (which may represent books, chapters, or other collections). These map and topic can then be passed to external processing tools (like the DITA Open Toolkit) to be generated into specific deliverable formats, and can also be processed within FrameMaker to be assembled into books.

You might suggest that authoring in FrameMaker forces people to think in a book-centric manner because of the print format of the WYSIWYG authoring view. Although this may be the way you’ve seen FrameMaker used, this is completely up to you as the author to format the authoring view however it makes sense for your workflow and writers. When opening an XML file, you select a structure application to use, which applies a template which defined the way the content is rendered on screen. You can set up this structure application with a print-focused layout or you can choose to use fonts and a layout that looks very simple.

One example of this is found in the default DITA-FMx 1.1 Topic application which has no indents, uses Verdana as the font throughout and looks more like a web page than a printed book. If you choose to create a PDF from the DITA map and use the default Book application, the print formatting is applied. But while authoring, using the Topic application, you are encouraged to focus on the content rather than the formatting since it’s likely that you are creating deliverables for multiple output formats, of which print (PDF) is only one.

Just because FrameMaker has traditionally been the standard tool for authoring long documents doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for topic-based authoring as well. It is a very flexible and customizable authoring tool, which should be evaluated carefully with other tools when selecting an appropriate XML editor.

PDF Publishing with DITA-FMx 1.1

FrameMaker and DITA-FMx provide the easiest and least expensive way to get the highest quality PDF output from your DITA content. In addition to the numerous authoring features in DITA-FMx, it also provides many useful publishing options. Some of the more popular are listed below:

  • Add related links from relationship tables
  • Flatten conrefs and ensure that links are functional in PDF output
  • Apply ditaval filtering to the generated book files
  • Move figure titles so the follow the image
  • Enable table titles to display on all pages for tables that span pages
  • Assign proper numbering and pagination throughout the book
  • Replace “list” files with generated FrameMaker lists (e.g. TOC, Index)
  • Run custom scripts to perform additional pagination and cleanup

See how easy it is to get properly formatted PDF output from a DITA map using DITA-FMx. This video walks you through the basic process of configuring DITA-FMx for PDF publishing.

If you’re a new user of DITA-FMx or are considering a purchase, you should review this video.

» Link to video on YouTube.

Myth #1: FrameMaker isn’t a “real” XML editor

Well .. I guess you’d have to define “real XML editor,” but if by real you mean that the editor can open XML files on disk, and write the edited XML back to disk, then it’s as real as any other XML editor that I’ve seen. All XML editors have different features, and you may prefer one editor over another because of its features. But FrameMaker is definitely a real XML editor, because it can open, edit, and save XML files.

I hear people say that FrameMaker’s not a real XML editor because it uses a proprietary binary format and you can’t edit the XML tags directly. The truth is that all XML editors convert the XML on disk to some internal binary format while the file is open for editing. That’s how you get that nice tag coloring and fonts. Just because the XML you’re editing looks like the XML you think is in the file, that’s just eyewash. Granted, FrameMaker doesn’t let you edit the XML structure by entering tag names in angle-bracketed code, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are editing the same XML structure that you would with any other XML editor. It’s just a different rendering of the XML on disk than you’ll see in other tools. (It would be nice if FM provided a “code view” .. I hope that’s added in the future.)

FrameMaker does provide a number of views into the structure of the XML. It offers a “structure view” which is a collapsible tree of element nodes, allowing you to easily modify attribute values and rearrange the elements by dragging and dropping the nodes into new locations. It also offers a “tags view” which lets you see the element boundaries and their names in the content authoring window (similar to a code view, but you can’t actually edit the tags directly).

FrameMaker is actually one of the oldest XML editors on the market. There are valid reasons to use an XML editor other than FrameMaker, but the issue of it not being a “real XML editor” is not one of them.

Creating New Files in DITA-FMx 1.1

DITA-FMx offers some features that make new file creation simple and easy. Entering the title for the new topic in the New File dialog box automatically creates the file name based on a format that you have defined using special building blocks. You can also create new files using “element templates” which pre-populate the topic with boilerplate content that you have set up. Prolog metadata in new files can automatically be set with the author’s name and creation date, and each time you update a file, the revision date metadata can be automatically set.

This video introduces these and other features for creating new DITA files with DITA-FMx.

If you’re a new user of DITA-FMx or are considering a purchase, you should review this video.

» Link to video on YouTube.

Overview of the Map Authoring Features in DITA-FMx 1.1

DITA-FMx 1.1 provides a number of authoring features not available in standard FrameMaker 8 or 9. Some of these features are not available in other DITA editors, and are typically found only with a content management system. This video provides a quick tour of those features.

If you’re a new user of DITA-FMx or are considering a purchase, you should review this video.

» Link to video on YouTube.

DITA-FMx: Cloning the Default Structure Applications

If you’re using DITA-FMx and would like to modify the formatting and layout in the topic authoring view or for book publishing, you’ll need to modify the corresponding FrameMaker structure applications (Topic, Map, and Book). When it comes time to customize the structure apps, you should “clone” the default applications provided with DITA-FMx to create your own applications rather than modifying the default apps. This video walks you through each step of this process.

This is a fairly complex topic involving the modification of the structure application definition file (structapps.fm) as well as the structure application’s EDD and template files. If you’re just starting out, it’s probably best to work with the default applications for some time before worrying about any customizations.

» Link to video on YouTube.

Installing DITA-FMx 1.1

This video walks you through the complete process of installing DITA-FMx in FrameMaker. It also demonstrates the installation of the default structure applications and creation of a new DITA topic.

This video is useful for those who’d like a quick overview of the installation process. It also shows you the easy way to install new structure applications.

» Link to video on YouTube.