Thanks, Nadine and Scott.
As I mentioned in my other e-mail, DITA is just a learning curiosity for me at
this point. It *seems* overly compex for what I need, but looking to learn
nevertheless ...
Now to real reason for this thread!
My *current* flow is simple:
1. Write the documents and specifications in Unstructured FrameMaker 10.
These typical range from 10 pages to 200 page FM books (typically as
four separate chapters: Title, Content, Body and Index), and all have similar
look and feel - given that I am the only author, I can control this easily (and
anally! :)).
The content has quite a few referenced hyperlinks to other content
within them (only a few to external URL's) and these do come out properly in
the PDF.
Sidebar: my experience with text references (which I *would* like to
use for common content) has been not good - due to *my* not wanting to waste
time figuring out what *I* am doing wrong. My typical problem is that character
formats applied to text within the referenced content does not show correctly
in the final output, and I haven't bothered figuring out why - although I would
like to someday keep the common text in other files (text or FM) really, so
that a single change to them gets reflected in all the referencING documents.
2. Print to PDF using Adobe Acrobat X Pro.
I have found that "Save as PDF" and "Print to Adobe PDF" usually
results in differing output and have learned, over the years, to experiment
with each new release of DM and Acrobat, and the settings, till I get what I
need. With the latest versions of FM 10 and Acrobat Pro X, it looks like "Print
to Adobe PDF" is best at the moment, although "Save as PDF" from within
FrameMaker worked a lot better in the past.
3. Fix the few PDF file properties that did not come across from
FrameMaker 10.
This is usually stuff like Copyright information and meta-data that I
just change manually - some can be "set and forget" in FrameMaker 10, but
others need changes after the PDF is done. I have not found the place in
FrameMaker to do some of these items ...
... deep breath moment ...
However, I have a *new* need for the near future.
There is a desire to have our documentation and specs, etc., as hyperlinked
HTML pages - but, with the PDF as an available separate option still). I *do*
like the idea of doing this actually, and now need to take my current FM books
and specs and output them in the correct format (for Confluence ... see below).
But, my early experiments with using the HTML output capability in FM 10 and
Acrobat Pro X is *miserable* to say the least! The result is atrocious and
unusable really.
In the interim, one person has been taking my PDF documents (he does not know
how to use FrameMaker) and creating all the HTML pages manually from the PDF
text (argh!) and inserting them into Confluence (see
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/overview for more info on that).
The result is a loss of the text hyperlinks, lots of time to do the work, etc.,
etc., etc.
So, I need to change my flow to output clean HTML that can be far more easily
put into Confluence and am trying to figure out the best way to proceed here.
Do people have recommendations as to the best workflow for this? I have changed
the title of this thread to make sure that I don't confuse everybody ...
Thanks!
Z
