Monthly Archives: May 2012

PDFs from DITA with FMx-Auto, oXygen, and Ant

If you’re not satisfied with your current DITA to PDF workflow, you might consider FMx-Auto. FMx-Auto enables automated (scripted) publishing of a DITA map through FrameMaker and DITA-FMx. This can be integrated into most publishing workflows on the desktop or server. If you’re interested in getting high-quality PDFs from your DITA content, like you used to get from unstructured FrameMaker, this may be the solution you’re looking for.

As an example of using FMx-Auto for publishing to PDF from a popular XML editor I set up an Ant script that creates the necessary AutoFM script from the current DITA map file name, then passes that to FrameMaker. The AutoFM script instructs FrameMaker to use the DITA-FMx Map-to-Book process to create a book and chapter files from the DITA map. This book is then saved to PDF.

This Ant script can be modified to suit your needs and can be used by other tools and publishing workflows as an integration option for publishing to PDF from DITA through FrameMaker. FMx-Auto supports FrameMaker versions 7.2 through 10, so even if you’re not using Frame for authoring, you can still use it for publishing.


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