Docbook versus Home-Grown

[Lynne A. Price]

At 03:21 PM 10/8/2006, Joe Malin wrote:
>I don't mind writing an EDD from the ground up. What I want to avoid is
>producing an EDD that is off-track from easy conversion to DocBook XML.
>My overall goal is to convert my unstructured FM to structured FM and
>then to XML on the way to HTML. Obviously this will be a long project.

Joe,
   Sounds like you want to create an EDD that is compatible with DocBook 
without being overwhelmed with the number of elements and attributes in 
DocBook. What I do in this situation is:

1) Make a list of all the DocBook elements. One way to do so is to create 
an EDD from DocBook with no r/w rules and from this EDD generate a list of 
all Tag elements.

2) Turn each entry in the list into a drop rule (or generate the list in 
this form to begin with):

    element "x" drop;
    element "y" drop;
    element "z" drop;

3) Review the list and decide which DocBook elements you want to keep. 
Comment out the corresponding rules:

    element "x" drop;
    /* element "y" drop; */
    element "z" drop;

4) Do something similar with attributes.

5) Create a new EDD using the drop rules. FM will not create element 
definitions for the elements you have dropped. Furthermore, it will remove 
mention of them from the general rules of the elements you are retaining. 
The result should be a manageable EDD. You can still use the DocBook DTD.

         --Lynne





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