Structuring documents (was RE: Adobe's New Corporate Strategies)

[Matt Sullivan]

<from earlier post>
While there's structured framemaker, dita, and a host of third party plugins
can anyone really say its a simple, painless, and quick process to
transition from unstructured framemaker to either structured or dita? 

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
_______________________________________________
</from earlier post>

Hi Joseph,

I generally teach my students in a hands-on environment to convert legacy
documents to XML in under 2 hours, so I do see the process as painless and
quick.

I'll be in Dallas at the Adobe booth next week for the STC Summit if you'd
like a quick runthrough.

Tom Aldous will also be there, and he's actually scheduled to a 15 minute
runthrough of document conversion at the Adobe booth this coming  Monday
from 1:15-1:30

I have our complete booth schedule, including booth demos and Adobe
presentations schedule available in PDF by request or at
http://blogs.roundpeg.com/2010/04/adobe-stc-summit/

Of course the success of the conversion depends upon the extent to which the
content adheres to a standard. For example, if your Word docs all use
Normal+ for formatting, or if your FM docs are riddled with *Body, then no
logic can be applied and thus, no easy conversion exists.

So if your authors worked with style sheets, the supplied conversion tools
(FM conversion tables) are well-worth the effort and can convert any number
of documents to fairly valid XML with little relative effort. 

If they didn't, I know of no tool, for FM or any other editor, that will
analyze and structure documents using ad hoc formatting.


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