Single sourcing from Frame and a wiki ... or something ...

Wed Jun 27 06:29:36 PDT 2012

Unfortunately I can only reply that we have the same problem, and that I ended up writing docs straight in the wiki (and banging my head on walls). One of ou dev did a nice job to produce neat HTMLs from the Wiki, but it is still very frech (we're currently profreading the first user's guide written this way). For PDF export, nothing matching PDF produced from FM has been done yet.

What I can say is that I am not happy with that, but devs are, because now I'm using THEIR tool, and them not MINE. But I'm the sole writer and they're stronger than me... :).

Any help on that question would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Mathieu

From: keith.soltys at tmx.com
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Single sourcing from Frame and a wiki ... or something ...
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:02:40 +0000

You may want to look at the Confluence wiki. I know that there is a DITA > Confluence tool (Dita2Wiki?) and WebWorks ePublisher will also convert FM to Confluence.
 However, I don’t know if it’s possible to go the other way, or to round-trip content between FM DITA and Confluence.  According to Sarah Maddox’s book on wikis, Confluence will import and export DocBook XML so that might be another option.

I’m sure others will comment on this.
Regards,
Keith

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com]
On Behalf Of rebecca officer

Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 2:03 AM

To: framers at lists.frameusers.com

Subject: Single sourcing from Frame and a wiki ... or something ...

Hi everyone

Our docs team (4 of us) creates a many-thousand-page multi-chapter user manual in unstructured Frame. Lots of tables and cross-refs.
 Conditional text used to publish several variants. Published as PDFs a couple of times a year, delivered online.

And the engineers (about 80) have a wiki that's a mish-mash of internal feature development info, some of which ends up in the user
 manual.

I've been asked to make the user manual and the internal docs use the same source, which both writers and engineers would write.
 We want to work collaboratively, stop duplicating effort and come much closer to real-time updates.

I'll need to include version control, content re-use, status tagging (e.g. draft/final), read-only access, and delivery as PDF and
 HTML. While I'm at it, I'd like to do automated builds and publish ebooks.

The engineers would like the wiki to be the source. The writers want to stay with FM. I'm prepared to make everyone change tools
 (*grin*) but only if we have to.

As a complicating factor, the engineers are all on Linux. Getting an FM licence per engineer would blow my budget (Adobe, how about
 selling a site licence???), and they'd have to run it in Virtual Box. I'm not seeing a happy ending there.

I've got plenty of implementation time and can lay my mitts on a programmer or two. Budget's not yet set but prob around $20K.

So ...

Does anyone know of a good tool for round-tripping Framemaker <--> Wiki?

Should I be looking at XML?

Any other thoughts on how I should tackle this?

Many thanks

Rebecca

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