Newbie with Questions

[Jakob Fix]

Kevin,

On 3/28/06, Kevin Rusnak <Kevin.Rusnak at onbase.com> wrote:
[...]
> MY ULTIMATE GOAL:
> 1. One of our line of business applications will produce XML from a
> button click. I have been told from a buddy of mine that is handling
> that end of the experiment that he can make the XML look like whatever I
> want.
>
> 2. When that XML stream is created, I want to automate the
> following...XML > FRAMEMAKER > PDF > EMAIL

If you're talking about automation, do you mean "Somebody clicks a
button on my website which generates some XML which gets converted to
PDF and then emailed to the person's email address"?  In this case,
FrameMaker may not be an optimal solution to your problem.  Although
FrameMaker can be accessed programmatically, through an SDK or
third-party tools, it is mainly a user interface for authors to create
contents interactively.

If I understand your requirements correctly, you'd rather need an
XSL-FO processor, ie. a tool which takes XML as input and creates PDF
as output.  In this case you should take a look at XEP
(http://renderx.com/).  The Apache project also provides such a tool,
free of charge that's called FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/).

However, all this is rather far away from the Technical Author's Path ...

Good luck.

--
cheers,
Jakob.