Unstructured to Structured: Question about retaining, paragraph formats

[Fred Wersan]

I think the answer to your question is somewhere between No and It 
Depends, but closer to No. It gets back to the structure vs. display 
issue. FrameMaker tries to give you both the XML world and the WYSIWYG 
world in one package. A more typical XML editor (like the new XML view 
in Frame 11) is just a text-based markup language editor that doesn't 
know anything about display. The XML output from such an editor gets 
turned into a formatted document by other software that transforms it 
(XSL and that stuff) based on the elements and attributes. This is how 
XML can get used in lots of different ways (single-sourcing). Different 
transformations yield different formatting based on the target display 
platform.

If FrameMaker, that display transformation takes place in real time in 
the interaction between the EDD and the para and char formats in your 
document based on the elements and attributes in your structure plus 
specific formatting overrides in the EDD. This means there is a 
temptation to build in a lot of attributes and formatting that is Frame 
specific. For example, some of my elements include whether or not I want 
the para or heading to be at the top of a page. This is entirely display 
related and something that would almost certainly be frowned upon if you 
were writing for multiple display environments.

Therefore, if you are round tripping for distribution in other display 
environments, I would actually suspect that you would want to minimize 
the format related stuff in your structure, rather than maximize it 
because the framemaker-specific formatting would make less sense when 
transforming to other display environments. If you are round tripping 
just for editing purposes and it always comes back to FrameMaker for 
printing/PDF, then that is less of an issue and you can do what works 
best for you. Even in that case, you might not want to burden the 
authors with format related attributes to think about.

Hope I've been at least somewhat coherent in my comments. I've probably 
simplified things a little. I don't do any round tripping, so I can't 
speak much to the pitfalls.

Fred


On 9/13/2012 6:29 PM, rebecca officer wrote:
> Hi guys
> If you're planning to roundtrip through XML, with different authors 
> using different XML editors, you'd need to have all the formatting in 
> the EDD, right?
> Or am I on completely the wrong track in my ignorance?
> Thanks
> Rebecca
>
>

-- 
Fred Wersan
VT MÄK, Principal Technical Writer
68 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
T: +1.617.876.8085 x124  Email: fwersan at mak.com

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