EDDs for MIL-STD-38784

[Keith Soltys]

Wow. Sounds like fun :).

Have you looked at the Adobe FrameMaker Structured Authoring forum?

http://forums.adobe.com/community/framemaker/framemaker_structured

If not, you might want to post there. You'll need to register first, I think.

Regards
Keith

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Michael Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 12:41 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: EDDs for MIL-STD-38784

Greetings from Utah!

Thanks to everybody who so generously responded to my recent query about FrameMaker EDDs for MIL-STD-38784.  I should have explained my situation more fully.

I am a greenhorn producer of structured documents who works for a small defense contractor near Hill AFB in Layton, Utah.  In fact, I am still working on my first structured Air Force TO.  I have some recent experience using of FrameMaker 9 for unstructured docs--about two years.  During those two years I produced several thousand nearly pain-free pages with FM and love it.

Right now we are doing a lot of work on the A-10 and generating some Air Force TOs in the process.  The company produces Word documents that other contractors or government people import into SGML.  Recently the Air Force has mandated that we produce all our new TOs in SGML.  Although we have not yet had our first TO guidance conference (upcoming in May), we are pretty sure the Air Force wants us to use 38784STD-BV8a.dtd, 38784STD-BV8a.fos and 38784STD-BV8a.fosi, which are downloadable as a zip file from Wright Patterson AFB.  We recently purchased one seat of Arbortext editor, which allows us to deal with the FOSIs.  (The .fos file is the screen FOSI and the .fosi file is the paper page FOSI.)  The early results with Arbortext are somewhat encouraging, and the screen does in fact resemble the actual manual as we type things in.

Right now we are looking for an econmonical way to use produce printable PDF files from the SGML.  Things are not looking too rosy with Arbortext.  It looks like we need to spend a lot more money on software.  We understand Datalogics Composer does the best job, and can deal with FOSIs and change pages the best.  However, the price is $50,000 to buy and $9,000 a year to maintain it.  The Arbortext solution is called Print Composer.  It is far less expensive (about $1,400 a year including maintenance) but using it requires that we tinker with the print FOSI a great deal to get it to work.  We may even have to write our own print FOSI.

Although I am no expert, it seems to me that FrameMaker is the least expensive solution.  As I understand it, the Framemaker EDD is a combination of a FM template and the DTD.  I think that if we created our own Air Force 38784 EDD, we would not have to buy any more software to produce the printable PDF files.  Am I correct?  If so, it would be even better if we could find a commercial version of the Air Force 38784 EDD.

Thanks for wading through this and thanks in advance for any replies!





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