Hi Karen, I would suggest trying Mif2Go (http://www.omsys.com) to generate your XML from unstructured FrameMaker. It is easier to customize the output you get and it should resolve the duplicate ID problem. If it works for you, it will cost you around $300 US. Structured FrameMaker is fine, but then you have to develop an EDD, read/write rules, etc. You will basically be re-engineering your authoring environment to get better control over your output. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you are happy with unstructured FrameMaker, I would try Mif2Go so you can simply get good XML without messing around with the FrameMaker portion of your workflow.
Rick Quatro Carmen Publishing 585-659-8267 www.frameexpert.com As mentioned in my other post; I produce documentation using FrameMaker 70p579 and we are now attempting to get all of our documentation online in a help system, using a tool written in-house with our own software (a 4GL called Cyberscreen), while maintaining the existing documentation for PDF and print output. Initially my part in this was just to save the individual chapters of each book as xml, producing a .xml and .css for each chapter, plus make sure all the images were saved as gifs. As predicted by people on this list, we keep hitting problems with the XML that Frame outputs. Last month the problem was related to formatting that was applied using the toolbar and not character and paragraph tags, this week it's the discovery of duplicate IDs in the XML (see separate post). 4 months+ since the project started and I'm definitely past the point of thinking we are doing the right thing. I'm currently devoting practically all my time (as the sole technical writer in the company) to resolving the formatting issues, and now there's the duplicate ID problem. Is it worth trying to carry on using 70p579, or should I upgrade to 7.2? If I upgrade will the extra XML features mean I can avoid using Structured Frame or is there no way around it? I would rather bite the bullet now, than waste even more time by plodding on hopelessly as I have been doing. TIA Karen Technical Writer Cyberscience Corp UK http://www.cyberscience.com
