XML and FrameMaker

Wed Jan 17 08:25:30 PST 2007

Pedro,

In general, the EDD contains both the document definition AND its relationship to the formatting.

I do not see this as being a problem as you suggest it is and have been happily developing EDDs for over 10 years.

To create an EDD, the DTD is imported into FrameMaker. The read/write rules will be used to rename or drop elements as required. If you need to update your DTD, you can then re-import into the existing EDD.

There are two main ways in which formatting can be added to an EDD; either by putting the formatting directly into the EDD; or by referencing styles in the template. A combination of both is most likely to be used in order to fully benefit from the EDD's context rules.

Using the template approach would allow you to separate most formatting from the EDD ... the template therefore being your stylesheet. You would then be able to change your template with a need to edit the EDD each time.

As Allen points out, this is all documented in the Developer's Guide and will answer your questions in a lot more detail.

Regards
Mark Poston
Mekon Ltd.

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+mark.poston=mekon.com at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces+mark.poston=mekon.com at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Pedro Pastor
Sent: 17 January 2007 10:44
To: framers at FrameUsers.com
Subject: XML and FrameMaker

Thank you very much to you for your response.

I can see I misunderstood some point on this topic, but some doubts
still remains in the roundtrip process. In any case I didn't mean that
working with a "tag-based" editor + "style-sheets" is better than
working with FM (from the authoring point of view), but I need to
demonstrate that to people (and to me) for convincing them to invest
time and money on it.

I've read the Adobe documentation on this topic and the XMLCookBook
tutorial, but (I think) this is too short and simple for the importance
and complexity of the matter. In order not to pester you with too many
questions, I would appreciate some information source for a deeper
understanding of the way of dealing with XML in FM.

In addition to this, I'd like to pose you some more questions:

1)       What is the relationship between DTD and EDD in an structure
application:

I though DTD would direct structure editing (element catalogue,
structure editor, ...) and EDD would maintain the mapping between
structure and presentation, BUT it seems it is not the case, at least
not for XDocBook.

In XDocBook application FM DocBook structure is not DocBook compliant
(for example: FM "Chapter" is  DocBook "chapter". Also, the FM "Head"
element is not a DocBook Element): That's the reason why we need
Read/Write rules. No need for if FM would use the DTD directly.

NOTE: I'm not telling the R/W Rules mechanism is not an important one. I
see it is needed if FM is using a kind of internal structure definition
and I'd like to export that structure to be compliant with and external
application DTD. On the other hand, for modifying structures on
Import/Export I would not have re-invented the wheel, XSLT (or DSSL for
SGML) could do the job much better. 

On the other hand, where is the whole set of "Document Definition" rules
for a document type? I couldn't find an EDD containing the whole DocBook
grammar. 

2)       Is really EDD (internally) supporting the document structure
(Schema) information?

 If that were the case, having EDD store structure and presentation
information is not a good practice. I would expect to have a
"Structure-Definition" document spitted form a "Presentation-Definition"
document. I think we should agree in this point (¿?). I would fear to
touch my precious "Document Type Definition" documentation just to note
down that some font has to change (today) and some other feature
tomorrow !!!!  Then, this decoupling is compulsory (I think).

3)       Another set of doubts is (stemming from the previous troubles)
the appropriate strategy for designing my own XML application in FM. For
example, is trying to make profit of some already designed structured
application and like to "Re-vamp" some structured template: How can I do
that? How can I get the "grammar" for that structured document and the
presentation mapping for that grammar?

Well, I seems like I'm at loss on this field, and, as stated before, I
wouldn't like to bore you with many (and maybe naïve) questions. And I
would appreciate answers as I do references to interesting sources of
information.

Regards,

Pedro
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