What's your top feature request for FrameMaker 11?

[Craig Ede]

I like the idea of FM going to a straight XML authoring environment. 

 

This automatic conversion of unstructured FM documents to XML sounds great!
But how would it be done? By encasing paragraphs in their paragraph tags?
It's a bit harder than that to figure out the structure of a document; you
would have to feed that into the conversion process somehow. How many people
would be willing to do that? And how many current unstructured FM documents
would be well suited for such conversion?

 

If somebody could figure out a clever visual tool that would allow you
(within a screen editing tool like the FrameMaker user interface) to open a
book giving the name for the doctype,  then walk you through the document as
you pick out the places for each tag that has started to end and define all
the containers that are within that container --- well, that would be great!
You'd have to have a pretty good idea about how XML works for this to work
effectively, even if such a tool existed. And any automated process based on
formats within the document, would probably give pretty weak results leaving
all the upgraders to wonder what is 'sposed to be so spiffy about XML.

 

Craig

 

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com 



...<snipped>...

FrameMaker should be converted into a true XML authoring environment. There
should be no structured or unstructured frameamerk. There should just be
FrameMaker, which has XML files. When I upgrade to the latest version of
FrameMaker, all my binary files should be converted into XML documents. You
should publish a XSD that defines the XML doc structure and leverage the
existing XSLT engine, so that out of the box any FrameMaker book can be
converted into any publishing format the user would care to. And also allow
the user to design their own XSLTS to convert into some other format that
people haven't even thought of yet. That way I can truly single source all
my content in FrameMaker instead of having to use the buggy Framemaker to
Robohelp integration.

 

In addition, provide a GUI that allows me to design a template and structure
(similar to structured framemaker ) that allows me to perform schema
validation of the structure and enforces controls on what the template may
contain. Basically, this would just be a port of EDD more or less.

 

the point is that FrameMaker fundamentally needs to be an XML authoring
environment instead of XML authoring kinda sorta supported if you are
willing to bite the bullet and convert to structured FM. Increasingly few
people can do so because the cost is so high, its hard to make a business
case. I know I can't and I have looked into this extensively.  Adobe has
tried to pretend that converting over to structured authoring is easy but in
order to do this they have to have SEVEN webinars or a 7 hour training
session just to give the basics!! While a huge change, I believe this one
architectural change will provide the framework to address many of the other
problems and competitive disadvantages framemaker has with other products
out there. 

 

...<snipped>...

 

Sincerely,

Joseph Lorenzini

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