Structured FM, DITA, and DOCX

[Scott Prentice]

Hi Rene...

You can create a mixed-source (structured and unstructured) FM book 
using your existing TCS tools set, and publish online Help via RH. 
However, maintaining that book might be a little tricky and error prone 
since you'll need to manually manage the book properties.

Our plugin, DITA-FMx, does support the automated assembly of FM books 
from DITA and unstructured files. This process will let you produce the 
same FM book you'll get from standard FM processes but will be more 
consistent and save you time with each book-build.

To add the DOCX files into the mix, you might want to consider WebWorks, 
which can generate output from a mix of Word, FM 
(structured/unstructured), and DITA .. not part of your current toolset, 
but might be worth the cost if you really need to integrate with Word files.

A DOCX file is a collection of XML files (in a ZIP archive), so in 
theory you could create a process that extracted the necessary content 
files and parsed them with XSLT to create a DITA (or other XML) files. 
The only tool I'm aware of that does this is the word2dita DITA 
OpenToolkit plugin that's part of the DITA4Publishers plugin. I've not 
tried this myself yet, but I'm sure it works reasonably well. Just how 
you'd incorporate that into a workflow might be up for discussion. (If 
you're interested in exploring this word2dita plugin, I'd be happy to 
help out .. contact me off list.  :)

Cheers,

...scott

-- 
Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com
+1.415.485.1892



Rene Stephenson wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have a new work situation that's pretty mixed. Very active product 
> lines, selling millions of each product annually, tight deadlines with 
> a solid customer base. They have distributed writing efforts where a 
> lot of engineers do the writing and therefore Word is strongly 
> entrenched. But, the marketing side is all for the FM/PDF workflow, 
> especially since their user doc is either online (via RH) or printed 
> materials (PDF preferred by their print company). So, the marketing 
> writer and I have been using Adobe TCS (RH, unstructured FM, PDF 
> review cycles) to meet the needs. However, the challenge that I now 
> have is finding a way to create system-level documentation that can 
> use the Word 2007/2010 DOCX files as a source so that Engineering can 
> keep it dynamic, fluid, and accurate, without going through some crazy 
> conversion process to get it into FM.
>
> I read the article at Adobe recently about how incrementally moving 
> into a DITA workflow via using Structured FM is the only practical way 
> to mix structured and unstructured files. Made sense to me. Someone 
> else had mentioned that DOCX can be manipulated via XLST and DITA... 
> so it seems maybe there's a way to get things going...??  Is there a 
> plug-in for FM or some program that works with FM, or do I already 
> have a solution in the TCS arsenal that I just don't know about yet?
>
> Any direction that you could give me would really be appreciated!
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Rene Stephenson
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------