Saving as XML... is it futile?

[Rick Quatro]

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