Preparing to Subversion FrameMaker Files

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Currently, I store and work on all my framemaker books on a network share. I
am using unstructured framemaker. This is a drag for a variety of reasons.
The number one reason, of course, is the network latency. For a very long
time now, I have desperately wanted to set up a subversion repository. I
have not done this because of storage concerns; since framemaker files are
binary, a commit would not commit the difference it would commit an entirely
new version of the file. Until I had the ability to only commit the
differences instead of the whole file to a subversion repository, i didn't
think it was worth trying.

While it looks like that day is finally here. The IT admin explained that
subversion control has gotten good enough that while it can't tell you line
by line what has changed, it will only commit the differences instead of the
whole file. I have done some preliminary testing and everything seems to be
working. I plan to use tortoise svn (its free yay!).

Before I make the jump though, I wanted to know if there were any framemaker
specific pitfalls i needed to watch out for when I set up the subversioning.
I do know that merging doesn't work so having multiple people work on the
same file is a no go but that just means the tech writers (there are two of
us) will have to use svn locks on the files we are currently working on.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini