Batch production of PDFs

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:05:52 +0100, "Charles Johnston" 
<cdfjohnston at gmail.com> wrote:

>We translate our manuals to 26 languages, which will (we're not there yet)
>give us a need to batch-convert a large number of Frame books to PDF, after
>which they will be e-mailed to the translators for review - very preferably
>automatically.
>
>ePublisher AutoMap can do this, of course. However, for this
>alone Quadralay's pricing is unrealistic.
>
>Can anyone recommend an alternative tool? Maybe just a plug-in to Frame that
>supports batch PDF-generation of multiple books, 

Sure, runfm does batch production, including of PDF and
print output.  It's part of Mif2Go, but it's one of the
many freebies in it, since it works fully with the demo
version (with our blessings):
  http://www.omsys.com/dcl/download.htm

You do need to install the plugin DLLs, m*.dll, in your
\frame\fminit\plugins dir, because runfm uses them to
communicate with Frame.  You also need to put runfm.exe
in your \windows\system32 dir, but you don't need to
install anything else.  The documentation for runfm is
in Chapter 34, "Converting via runfm", of the User's 
Guide, which is downloadable in a dozen formats on the
same page above.

>but the e-mail functionality would be very nice to have.

Note that since you normally invoke runfm from a .bat,
you can readily add any other system commands you please 
to the process.  I'd be surprised if there wasn't a free
utility around to send an email with an attachment from
the command line...  ;-)

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/