New to the list, and asking for help

[quills at airmail.net]

Pedro,

Using a pure editor to tag your document with XML tags is fine. It 
won't print anything but text, including the structure tags for all 
to see.

The EDD is the translation document that assigns the format tags to 
the structure tags. The FrameMaker template contains the formatting 
instructions for the output. The rules provide instructions for 
converting to formatting.

The structure document is pure text, and only text. It contains no 
presentation information like formatting. The EDD and template 
provide the formatting information for presentation. Do not fall into 
the fallacy that a XSLT or CSS will provide a formatted document that 
you can print from. XSLT can transform it but it takes a great deal 
of work to get one to output printed format. CSS is only for web 
presentation.

Even using things like Epic Editor, you still have to have the DTD 
and a separate style document to produce a format for presentation. 
FrameMaker provides both aspects in one package.

Scott


At 4:37 PM +0100 1/16/07, Pedro Pastor wrote:
>I am new to this list. I was lurking for a while and I finally decided
>to show up.
>
>My main interest in FrameMaker is for XML-documents authoring tasks. I
>am quite new to FrameMaker (few weeks experience, 7.2 installed), but I
>have a good background and experience working with XML technologies.
>
>The first impression when learning Structured FM is double:
>
>-          An impressive tool.
>-          Weird and complicated way of dealing with XML.
>
>Maybe the troubles I've found come from my inexperience developing
>structured applications in FM, but I cannot fully understand the aim
>behind the (so called) "XML-roundtrip" editing
>
>1)       I cannot understand how to clearly separate structure from
>presentation in FM. If EDD contains structure and presentation
>information we are against the main principles of SGML/XML document
>design!!
>
>2)       It seems like there are two placeholders for storing
>presentation information: Templates and EDD documents. This could be
>redundant, I mean, the same presentation definition data could be store
>on both places.
>
>3)       In addition to this, Template document could have structure
>associated with it (via importing EDD document). Then we get just
>another way of associating structure to documents, apart from the DTD
>specification!!).
>
>4)       When working with XML applications like DocBook, I don't
>understand the need for "Rules" just to change capital letters. It seems
>like FM is not working internally in XDocBook when you choose to work
>with an XDocBook application. In fact, the structure generated by FM is
>not even DocBook 4.x compliant.
>
>
>  It seems to me that this roundtrip is  trying to match a mature legacy
>product (Structured FrameMaker) with the new emergent XML technologies,
>but it is not intended for XML authoring (as its main objective). At
>this point, (it seems)  it is easy to me to produce XML documentation
>(using whatever DTD I'd like) by means of more "developer-oriented" XML
>editors like XML_Spy or Oxygen together with XSLT+CSS style-sheets then
>all the burden of taming Structured FM for this purpose.
>
>I'm sure I should have misunderstood something in this picture, and
>that's the reason why I ask for the help of the experienced FM users.
>
>Thank you very much.
>
>Pedro Pastor
>Software Engineering Department.
>University of Alicante
>Spain