Frame reference book and Word --> FrameMaker

[Jared Crawford]

Hi, Sue.

My FrameMaker training included Adobe's Classroom in a Book ( http://tinyurl.com/b3moea ), and FrameMaker's Help system. The Classroom in a Book series is excellent because it's a tutorial that forces you to bump into functionality that you might not otherwise be aware of. It comes with files on which to perform the tasks. If you sit down and do all the exercises in the book in one day, you will become an intermediate FrameMaker user overnight.

Over the years, a lot of coworkers have praised FrameMaker: The Complete Reference ( http://tinyurl.com/b3xd7z ) for solving various issues, but not as initial training. 

Adobe has some decent training resources on their website too, such as this video: https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p29205929/

As to converting Word documents to FrameMaker, it's generally a painful process because most Word documents are not carefully structured using paragraph and character styles. 

Word 2007 and FrameMaker 7 (and later versions) have good structured authoring features, so it's possible to use XML DTDs to bring structured Word content into FrameMaker. A Word --> RTF or PDF --> FrameMaker path may help bring in formatted content.

If your Word content is not structured, you're probably better off just converting them to plain text, pasting it into your FrameMaker template as Body text, and then reapplying the appropriate paragraph and character styles.

Thanks,

--Jared


------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 08:27:51 -0800
From: "Susan Curtzwiler" <SusanCu at vmc.com>
Subject: RE: Frame reference book
To: "Raymond, Michael" <Mike.Raymond at Ingenix.com>,
    <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Message-ID:
    <CFE9C43FE145FE49ACCA41586FF1918D462B3E at entmbx05.invmc.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;    charset="iso-8859-1"

I will be watching for replies to this request. I am also rebuilding my knowledge with Frame. I could share this with my coworker, we both have been using Word for too long and now converting our files to Frame. 
Any easy reference books about Frame would be helpful. 
Thank You. 

Sue