Converting HTML to structured FrameMaker

[LW White]

Hi Roger,

The Dita Open Toolkit includes a plugin, h2d, that converts HTML to DITA. As you suspect, the cleaner and more pristine the HTML is, the smoother the conversion. I have converted HTML authored in both RoboHelp and Flare to DITA and it's not a painless process as both products introduce a lot of proprietary namespaces and...uh, creative tagging to their HTML. In those cases, I have had better luck writing a batch find/replace file tailored to the flavor of HTML I am working with. It takes some time up front and the results still need cleaning up, but I believe the net is a time savings and it is a process not limited to Frame.

Best,
Leigh



--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: rshuttleworth at avbasesystems.com
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:04:34 -0400
Subject: Converting HTML to structured FrameMaker

Hello All
 
We have a legacy Help system, authored in Robohelp, so all the original content is HTML. We would like to import the HTML into FrameMaker, preferably structured, preferably DITA. There are about 300 pages involved.
 
I'm wondering if one route would be HTML > XHTML, and then some kind of a transform to DITA XML. However, I'm not optimistic about consistency of tagging in the HTML.
 
Any ideas? Thanks.
 
Roger
 
Roger Shuttleworth
Technical Documentation
AV-BASE Systems Inc.
1000 Air Ontario Drive, Suite 200
London, Ontario
N5V 3S4
Tel. 519 691-0919 		 	   		  
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