Structured Frame Help

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Thu,  5 Mar 2009 10:52:04 +1100, roconnor1 at netspace.net.au wrote:

>I haven't used Framemaker for about 7 yrs (unfortunately) and only used 
>unstructured Frame in V5.5
>
>Does anyone out there have some source templates, or a small book example of a 
>structured doc? I need to get up and racing pretty quickly and I figure using 
>an existing example is always the easiest way.
>
>I have Framemaker 7.1 right now but will be moving to V8.0 next week and 
>utilising the DITA mapping as well. So rather than panicking I'm screaming for 
>help.

If you want to move to DITA in structured Frame, there are
two basic methods.  With Frame alone, you can prepare a 
"conversion table" and get DITA 1.0 structure in Frame 7.x
and 8.  If you want DITA 1.1, which we highly recommend 
over 1.0, you need Frame 9, *or* Leximation's DITA-FMx,
which now supports 1.1 in FM7.2, FM8 and FM9 (but not 
in FM 7.1).  Actually, you need DITA-FMx in any case,
just to fix Frame's numerous DITA bugs:
  http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/beta.php
(And Scott's support is excellent!)

You can also use Mif2Go to convert UNstructured Frame
files (from any version since 5.5.6) to DITA 1.1 (or
1.0, if necessary).  Most people seem to find that much
easier than the conversion-table route (where you can't
get to 1.1 without FM9 in any case).  There's a free
unlimited demo version of Mif2Go at:
  http://www.omsys.com/dcl/download.htm

So what we'd suggest is use Mif2Go to get from your
FM 7.1 docs to DITA 1.1, then when you have Frame 8,
use DITA-FMx 1.0 to move the DITA files into (and
out of) structured Frame.

Once you are in structured Frame, you'll want to make 
your PDFs within Frame, not via the DITA-OT, unless you
also want to become an XSLT and Java programmer.  <g>
And you can still use Mif2Go to make on-line HTML help;
it's much faster and easier than the DITA-OT for that.

HTH!

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