[framemaker-dita] ANN: Renaming DITA Map Topics

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:43:32 +0100, Yves Barbion 
<yves.barbion at gmail.com> wrote:

>I'm not sure whether Fm+DITA users are a shrinking 
>population, Jeremy. 

I am.  I can't give you a rigorous statistical study, 
but I can tell you that of those using Mif2Go to go
from Frame to DITA, the clear majority are not staying 
with Frame.  This includes *all* the major enterprises 
involved; we can't name names, but I can say most of 
them are represented on the DITA TC...  That's a lot
of seats, easily in the thousands.

>My experience is that existing Frame users keep using 
>Frame to author DITA content, mainly for two reasons:

That's a self-selecting group; the rest don't go to
consultants with Frame expertise, they go to their 
new editor vendor.  Or they have in-house transition 
teams; that's what we see most often.

However, smaller groups and individual writers may
very well choose to stay with Frame, for the reasons
you cite:

>1. DITA-FMx, which really integrates DITA authoring 
>in a Frame production environment (and most of them 
>are already familiar with the unstructured Frame 
>environment).

Yes.  Don't do DITA in Frame without it!  I consider
it absolutely essential, and we say so in our docs.

>2. DITA2PDF output. An experienced Frame user can 
>easily design FrameMaker templates, and then generate 
>FrameMaker books from his ditamaps.

Yes, that's the other big advantage.  PDF is still
important to most doc projects, and the quality you
can get with minimal work from Frame far exceeds that
available after literally weeks of work customizing 
the OT's PDF pipeline.  It's night and day.  There are
many good people working on improving the OT, and
I don't want to minimize their accomplishments.  But
even after paying the non-trivial cost of RenderX XEP 
or Antenna House, which are required for serious work
with the OT's PDF, Frame is still well ahead.

This is an area we *plan* to address in DITA2Go,
but we don't have it yet.  We do have a workaround,
which is using the DITA2Go Word output and having 
Word make PDFs, but Frame does better than that.

>And hey, some people would even buy Frame and MIF2Go 
>to convert their Word content to DITA:

Yes, and that's a good route; the tools for doing
it direct from Word exist, but the path via Frame
and Mif2Go has better ROI for most users, IMHO.
Then you also have Frame available for the PDFs
afterwards, a *very* big plus.

>Anyway, I agree that we could really use good toolmakers 
>like Rick (and you too Jeremy, and Scott) in other DITA 
>authoring environments than Frame.

Thanks!  There are a few more I can think of too,
who might want to look at the need for tools similar
to those they already produce for Frame in the wider
DITA community.  You know who you are.  ;-)

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