Hi Rebecca Your to-do list is pretty accurate. I've added my comments below, preceded by [Yves]>>>
On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 9:49 AM, rebecca officer < rebecca.offi...@alliedtelesis.co.nz> wrote: Hi everyone Thanks very much for your answers. I really appreciate the expertise on this list. [Yves]>>> You're welcome. I'm asking because I proposed to my team that we investigate going to DITA. One of my team members asked why not just use our existing set of paragraph tags etc and convert those to structured Frame and then into an XML schema? I didn't really have a good answer. [Yves]>>> Because you'd be reinventing the DITA wheel, and this would mean a lot of work. As well as us editing docs in Framemaker, we'd want engineers editing the same docs in another XML editor, eg Oxygen. So we'd have to round-trip. [Yves]>>> Good idea and good choice of tools: oXygen XML Author and FrameMaker+DITA-Fmx play very well together. With FMx-Auto ( http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/fmx-auto.php ), you can even generate Fm books from within oXygen. So am I right that if we do our own schema, we'd have to: - create a template (based on our unstructured FM one): [Yves]>>> correct, but you may have to create templates (plural), which may be difficult to maintain - model tables, cross-references, images, etc: [Yves]>>> correct - model some equivalent of conrefs if we want content reuse [Yves]>>> correct, but also think of equivalents of other advanced DITA reuse techniques, such as conditional text (ditaval), relationship tables, keys (keyref, keydef, conkeyref...) - create some equivalent of ditamaps [Yves]>>> correct, this would be Fm books - create an EDD [Yves]>>>correct, but you may have to create multiple EDDs (for authoring and for publishing) - create a DTD [Yves]>>> correct, but this may be multiple DTDs (for various information types) - create read/write rules [Yves]>>> correct - create XSLT and CSS files in order to output XHTML [Yves]>>>correct - create an XSL-FO file in order to output PDFs [Yves]>>>not necessarily. you can also create your PDFs via FrameMaker [Yves]>>> When doing the information modeling, do not underestimate the effort to define the metadata and the attributes in particular. Or am I drastically on the wrong track? [Yves]>>> No, you're doing just fine. ;-) Does structured Frame automatically provide any of the above? [Yves]>>> Structured Frame without DITA (so saving your files as .fm not .xml)? No. Structured Frame with DITA? Yes, and structured Frame with DITA-FMx even a lot more than that: http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/featurecomparison.php [Rebecca] With DITA, I think we'd use DITA-FMx. Does that make it easier to muck with your PDF output? From what I've read, PDFs sound like the biggest pain point so far. [Yves]>>> There are various ways and tools to generate PDFs from DITA-structured content: - DITA > FrameMaker > PDF - DITA > FrameMaker+DITA-FMx > PDF - DITA > XSL-FO > PDF - DITA > Word > PDF - DITA > WebWorks ePublisher > PDF My favourite way is to generate PDFs via DITA-FMx because it is very easy to design custom (or variants of) FrameMaker "bookbuild" templates. "Bookbuild templates" (aka "component templates") are used to generate Fm books from the DITA map. Then, you save this Fm book as PDF. If you know how to design professional unstructured FrameMaker templates, you can also design DITA-FMx bookbuild templates. These videos show you how the bookbuild process goes: http://youtu.be/rkQHuxtRmk0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULFJ53RTHxo Cheers Yves
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