Frame xml to sgml conversion

[Kevin Farwell]

Hello,

The DTD is an arbitrary document. There should be no limit within 
FrameMaker. You may need to create a custom structured application, 
but that can mean as little as an hour's work, depending on the 
target DTD. Granted, it can also mean a week's work, depending on the 
target DTD.

Assuming an acceptable cost of customization, I think converting the 
unstructured FrameMaker files to the correct structure in FrameMaker 
and then saving them as SGML would be the most efficient process. 
Converting them with Mif2Go or other tools of that kind would be a 
quick way to SGML, but no conversion is 100% efficient. The last 5% 
or 10% is always done by hand. (I consider ten or twenty XSLT or 
regex operations to fix specific errors hand work.) I like 
FrameMaker's graphic interface for that last bit. Some tools, like 
Arbortext, won't open a mostly valid file. FrameMaker will open it 
and tell you exactly what's wrong.

Either method, converting in FrameMaker or converting with another 
tool, will require a conversion map (styles to elements, and then 
elements within other elements) of some kind. It's impossible to say 
which would be the more difficult in your case, but I've always found 
FrameMaker easy to work with in that respect. The nesting command 
syntax is basically DTD syntax.

Kevin

At 2:41 PM -0500 1/13/10, Butler,
	Darren J CTR USAF AFMC 584 CBSS/GBHDB wrote:
>Hello FrameManiacs,
>
>We use Arbortext for sgml authoring. Due to differences in DTDs, using
>structured FM for this is not an option for us. We have a need to
>convert unstructured FM into XML that can be morphed-up to sgml either
>by technique or application(s).
>I'm curious to know what tools and/or techniques are being used to
>accomplish FrameMaker *.xml files to sgml (non-Frame).
>
>Thanxs,
>DJ
>
>Darren J Butler
>TDSS Technical Writer/Editor
>584 CBSS/GBHDE via CACI Corp
>Robins AFB, Georgia 31098
>[478] 222-7942
>
>
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