Automating Frame/WWP Help and PDF generation

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005 10:44:53 -0500, "Roger Shuttleworth" 
<rshuttleworth at activplant.com> wrote:

>My question relates to the software industry, so feel free to delete now
>if that's not relevant to you.
>
>I was talking to my manager and developers today. We are looking into
>the possibility of automating Help and PDF generation in the software
>build process, using our present tools of FrameMaker 7.1 and WWP (v.7
>and/or WWeP). The ideal scenario would be:
>
>1. Build process fires up WWP (via command line/API?).
>2. WWP takes Frame source files and generates Help files.
>3. Build process incorporates Help files into build.
>4. Build process fires up PDF generation from Frame.
>5. Build process incorporates PDF into build.
>
>I'm wondering if anyone on the list has experience in this, or whether
>it is actually possible in whole or in part. 

Yes, totally possible.  In fact, we announced a free utility,
runfm.exe, shipping with Mif2Go, which can be used for steps
1 through 3 above right now, except:
 
>It sounds unlikely to me, given that WWP rarely performs flawlessly 
>in my experience and manual intervention is usually required.

However, Mif2Go *does* perform flawlessly once you set it up,
so that is not a problem.  We use runfm ourselves for our
800-page User's Guide, building in nine different formats.
As with any development process, you need to do the work
before build time to make sure your results are as you want
them.  But once you do that, the "golden" build is stable.
And *no* manual intervention is needed in the build itself;
you can fire it off as a Scheduled Task at 3am if you want.

Further, in the next iteration of runfm, we will be adding
support for PDF generation, which handles steps 4 and 5 above.
We could probably send you a beta in a few days that does that.
So it looks like you are in luck, for a lot less than a CMS...

>There may be other tools that could accomplish this (e.g. a DITA
>workflow, CMS, etc.), but before we investigate those I need to know
>whether it is doable with what we have. Any suggestions would be
>welcome. Thanks.

Quite welcome!  See our announcement (the very next post on
Framers after yours) for links to runfm docs and download.
And the price is hard to beat... ;-)

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/