How does working with structured Frame differ from regular Frame? (LONG)

[Wendy McGovern]

Fellow Framers:

 

The dreaded day has come: the powers that be want to go toward a future
in publishing in XML. Here's the lowdown:

 

Company: Pennsylvania Bar Institute. We do continuing legal education
seminars for lawyers, and also have a publications department , PBI
Press, that does legal reference-type books. I am in charge of the
editing and production of those books, and we have a small staff that
has been working with FrameMaker (regular version, Frame 7) to produce
them. 

 

Type of product: There are two different types of publications produced
right now. For our seminar side of things, we produce a hard-copy book
that is printed in-house in our print shop. These are quick-and-dirty
books that are put together at the last minute sometimes when the
lawyers who write chapters for us get them to us. The book chapters
usually come from various authors and until a little while ago  had been
assembled in hard-copy format with manual pagination and tables of
contents typed up by the program secretaries. They now are trying to get
all the chapters in electronic form so that they have them for e-pubs,
which are online articles we offer for sale on our website. These
chapters are in Word or WordPerfect and the secretaries do the tables of
contents in Word. The e-pubs are PDFs of these chapters.

 

The PBI Press books, on the other hand, are more formal reference books
that are cite checked, copy edited, typeset in FrameMaker, and
proofread. We generate tables of contents, indexes of cases, and indexes
of statutes with Frame. We have an outside indexer do subject matter
indexes, which we then typeset and insert links to each page number by
cross-reference so that the next time we update the books, the index
will be mostly current and we only have to do an in-house tweaking to
add new subject items. For most of our books, we do an accompanying
CD-ROM by converting the Frame files to PDFs using Acrobat 8.

 

The company sees the future in single-source publishing, where we will
create both print and online versions of books, and eventually new
products like PDA-formatted content.

 

Now, the question: What will we have to do differently from the way we
produce a book in regular Frame today in order to make it XML if we went
to structured Frame? I have seen people on this list ask questions that
involve EDDs and DTDs, and, as an English and art major, would rather
throw myself under a bus than to have to work with computer
programming-looking stuff like that. (No offense to all you techies out
there in STC land.)

 

Is structured Frame flexible enough to allow for extremely UNstructured
content like we get from lawyers where we have a multiauthor book and
one person has structured their chapter one way and others structure it
another way, and because of the legal content, it CAN'T be made
consistent because that's the way the statutes are? And does it allow
for manual workarounds like we do when we get footnotes that take up 6
inches of a page and we must manually break things to keep the footnotes
with their references in the text?

 

What level of brainpower is needed for a worker to use structured Frame?
It's hard enough as it is to find people who can pick up Frame itself
with a level of competence we need (especially at the salaries we give
them as a nonprofit). What would a general salary range be for someone
to be a desktop publisher/typesetter working with structured Frame?

 

With structured Frame, do you typeset a Frame book and then do something
with the EDD/ DTD stuff, or do you have to plan the book with the
structural elements from the beginning, and how much extra time does all
that other stuff take to do to make it XML?

 

Am I overreacting, and is structured Frame not as much of a horror as I
think it's going to be? I'm not quite sure why PDFs, which have been
perfectly fine for our electronic publishing to date, are not seen as an
adequate delivery medium for the future, 

 

Whew! Anyone willing to take a stab at convincing me we need to go with
structure in the future?

 

Wendy McGovern
Publications Editor
Pennsylvania Bar Institute
5080 Ritter Road
Mechanicsburg, PA 17055-6903
1-800-932-4637, ext. 2257
wmcgovern at pbi.org