More than one element in a paragraph?

[Bernard Aschwanden]

In most cases you still end up having to set up the "tool" for formatting. Regardless of the software, that side of things never seems to change. Unless DITA is just a default in tools like Firefox and IE (like HTML is) then it's a long way to go.

Using the toolkit to run transforms is one idea there. However, you need to set up a stylesheet that displays correctly. If you choose to go with something like XMetaL, you need to do formatting work as well. No real escape from it.

Best idea though is to go with XML that is as tool independent as it can be. Then the XML can be used by the tools of choice, including basic editors, higher end XML tools and even publishing systems with something like FrameMaker behind them. As people start to get the structured authoring process in place that should make life easier. Heck, maybe you can have people author in something like Word and create XML for use with Frame. We've got a few clients that are actually doing that now. It's work to set up, but very neat once it's running.

The hardest part of that is the training. People need to work in pretty defined environments and a lot of manual habits can be tough to break free of.

Bernard


-----Original Message-----
From: Lin Surasky [mailto:Lin.Surasky at retalix.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 12:08 PM
To: Bernard Aschwanden; Mike Feimster; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: More than one element in a paragraph?

Hi, Bernard!

This is how I have it working now, but eventually I want to get away
from using FrameMaker templates to do the formatting. I'm clinging to
Frame for as long as I can, but ultimately I want to find a
tool-independent (or less-dependent) solution since it's not looking
like the rest of our team will be moving to FrameMaker.

Thanks for the input
:)
Lin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bernard Aschwanden [mailto:bernard at publishingsmarter.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 7:17 PM
> To: 'Mike Feimster'; Lin Surasky; framers at lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: RE: More than one element in a paragraph?
> 
> Another option is to set up the BugNum paragraph to use a 
> runin head tag. Then use a space for a separator.
> 
> Bernard