Resources to help a newbie create DITA documents in FrameMaker 10

[Robert Lauriston]

I've evaluated a number of DocBook and DITA authoring tools. With
Oxygen XML, which is the easiest I've tried, I created a sample
project and generated output within ten minutes. It took me somewhat
longer in XMetal but it wasn't hard.

FrameMaker 10 is by far the most opaque putative DocBook / DITA
authoring tool I've looked at. The help resources are all for
FrameMaker 7.x:

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/framemaker/?trackingid=ZLQL#xmldita

The Using the DocBook Starter Kit and Using the DocBook Starter Kit
guides are just a few pages of very abstract information. It
references the Structured FrameMaker Developer’s Guide, which I guess
has been supplanted by the "Structured Application Developer
Reference." Neither those docs nor the sample files bundled with
FrameMaker gave me any clue of how to create a project from scratch or
port an existing unstructured FrameMaker doc.

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Scott Prentice <sp10 at leximation.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not terribly surprised about this. No, there's nothing very useful that ships with the product. There's a lot "out there" in blogs and wikis and maillists .. but unless you know where to look or who to ask, you're probably out of luck. Yes .. posting to the FM forum should have provided more than just a reference to the docs.
>
> The problem is that "creating a DITA project" in FrameMaker is really no different than doing that in any other XML authoring tool. You do need to understand the structured FrameMaker UI, but DITA is DITA regardless of the tool.
>
> I often answer those posts on the FM forum, don't know why I missed it.  :o
>
> ...scott
>
>
> On 5/17/12 3:04 PM, Fei Min Lorente wrote:
>
> I was really surprised by the thread in the link below. I’d heard that Adobe added cookbooks and samples to the more recent versions of FrameMaker to help people get started with structure, and especially DITA. Is that all hype and no substance? Are you still hearing that people have trouble using DITA out of the box with FrameMaker 10?