Structured FrameMaker and MS Word XML Import

[David Versdahl]

Hello Everyone,

Currently we use standard FrameMaker to produce large (800-1000 page)
extremely technical documents. We begin them from scratch using input from a
wide variety of engineering sources. As a part of the book there are many
Visio images and a tremendous diversity of tables, equations, and cross
references.

We are embarking on a new project with a new 1200 page book. There are two
audiences for this book. One is a subset of the other. The request is that
we base this book on a single MS Word document that is maintained by one or
engineers at different sites. The content is constantly changing with the
addition of new material and the excising of outdated information. The
preference is to keep this a FrameMaker document so, we would take this Word
document and import it in some fashion into FrameMaker. The traditional
import function is impractical and tedious in this instance.

Our initial thought is to take the Word document and save it as XML, develop
an appropriate schema, and then import this XML into a structured FrameMaker
application. 

My question to you is whether or not this is a reasonable approach. Will it
work? If it will, what are the gotchas? Or, should we take the Word XML
output and work exclusively with an XML editor that ports to PDF (our
primary output)?

Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated.

Sincerely,

David Versdahl
Technical Writer, SR
Cypress Semiconductor