Resources to help a newbie create DITA documents in FrameMaker 10

[Scott Prentice]

Oh my .. I don't know how I left that out of my post. Yes .. DITA2Go is 
an excellent choice for publishing from DITA. Especially since you can 
now run it directly from the DITA-FMx menu in Frame (7.2 on up)!

Jeremy .. I may just quote you in the future. This is so true .. "OT is 
the most expensive free software ever created" .. !

Cheers,

...scott


On 5/18/12 11:02 AM, Jeremy H. Griffith wrote:
> On Fri, 18 May 2012 10:01:28 -0700, Scott Prentice wrote:
>
>> To step back a bit .. the DITA-OT is a library of XSLT and Java code
>> that lets you create may types of output (HTML, CHM, Eclipse Help, Java
>> Help, PDF, etc.). Yes, it's free and can be used to create all sorts of
>> output from DITA, but it can be a fair amount of work to set up and make
>> things look the way you want.
> To say the least.  You need to become an XSLT programmer
> to use it for anything of commercial quality.  And while
> it has a facility for adding your changes via plugins
> so that they survive version changes (which are frequent),
> there are still many reports of breakage from one rev to
> the next.  IMHO, the OT is the most expensive free software
> ever created...  ;-)
>
>> If you're using Frame for authoring DITA,
>> there's really no reason to use the OT for creating PDFs (it's way more
>> work and the results are far from stellar) ..
> Yes.  Definitely use Frame for PDFs.  In fact, even if
> you are not using Frame to author, using it with DITA-FMx
> for making PDFs is a better idea than using the OT.
>
>> however, it can be a good
>> option for online output *if* you're willing to do the coding to make
>> things work the way you want.
> Not just "willing", also capable.  XSLT is a programming
> language, not a "scripting" language.  It makes shell
> scripts, and even perl<g>, look easy...  If you want
> to get the flavor of it, get Michael Kay's book,
> ISBN 9781861005069, Wrox, $34.99 US, 972 pp., or a
> more recent edition of it (mine is 2001, before XSLT2).
> To attempt PDF, you also need Dave Pawson'r O'Reilly
> book on XSL-FO, another language of its own.
>
>> It is likely to be easier to use RoboHelp
>> (or Flare) to create the online output, but then you're paying for a
>> proprietary tool. You decide where you want to spend the money.  :)
> Or, use DITA2Go, which is Mif2Go with a DITA front end,
> and which is *free* for everyone.  DITA2Go produces all
> the outputs Mif2Go does, including Word RTF, from your
> ditamaps and bookmaps, and supports almost all DITA 1.2
> features including keyrefs.  To get it, sign up on:
>    http://dita2go.com
>
> If "free" isn't important, WebWorks lets you include
> DITA, Frame, and Word sources in the very same project,
> the only tool I know of that does that with real single-
> sourcing (like *2Go), not just import.
>
> HTH!
>
> -- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
>    <jeremy at omsys.com>     http://mif2go.com/
> _______________________________________________
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20120518/783cb3f0/attachment.htm>