Newbie with Questions

[Lynne A. Price]

At 09:12 AM 3/27/2006, Kevin Rusnak wrote:
>So far I have a really basic 3 line Frame template that I built in the
>Structured authoring environment.
>
>1. Company Name
>2. Account Rep
>3. Creation Date
>
>What I am supposed to do next?

Kevin,
   When you say you've built your template in the structured environment, I 
suspect that you mean that you selected Structured FrameMaker for your user 
interface but the template you have created is still an unstructured 
document. I gather Company Name, Account Rep, and Creation Date are 
paragraph formats?
   It does sounds like the next step is to create either a DTD or an EDD; 
whichever you create first, FrameMaker will create the other one for you.
   To give you a head start, here's a sample XML document you can start with.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE account [
<!ELEMENT account (company, rep, creation)>
<!ELEMENT company (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT rep (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT creation (#PCDATA)>
]>
<account>
<company>test</company>
<rep>me</rep>
<creation>03/27/06</creation>
</account>

The 4 lines between the square brackets are the DTD. You can save them to a 
separate file or let FrameMaker create a DTD for you. Here are some steps 
you can take using the above document.

1) Open it in FrameMaker; select <No Application> when FrameMaker prompts 
you for an application.

2) Click on the Structure View icon (3rd from the top in the upper right 
corner of the document window) to see the FrameMaker element structure

3) Click in the document to move the focus back to the document window

4) Use File > Structure Tools > Export Element Catalog as EDD to create an 
EDD from the structured document

5) Save the EDD.

6) Add text format rules to the EDD that refer to the paragraph formats 
you've defined.

7) Open your template

8) Make the test document your current file and use File > Import > Formats 
to import formats from your template into the test document

9) Import element definitions from the modified EDD into the test document

Have fun!

         --Lynne






>The whole process reminds me a lot of adding cascading style sheets to
>web pages on Dreamweaver...the one big difference is I can create the
>style sheets in Dreamweaver. I am still not seeing a way to create the
>EDD/DTD in Framemaker...without having a structure in place.

You need to define the structure by editing either the DTD or the EDD.



Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
lprice at txstruct.com            http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505      cell phone: (510) 421-2284