DITA conversion and cross-ref IDs

[Scott Prentice]

Hi Rebecca...

There are two things here that you need to take into account. First is 
just getting cross-refs to remain linked up through the conversion 
process from FM to XML. Second is to get those cross-refs to reference 
the individual topic files that result from "shredding" the 
chapter-based XML files into DITA topics (assuming that you're planning 
on going to separate topics and not nested chapter-DITA files). Also 
getting the xref/@href format correctly build can be tricky 
("<filename>#<topicid>/<elemid>").

Long ago I developed a plugin to handle all of this, and I've forgotten 
how to do it without the plugin .. although it can be done (with lots of 
scripting of various sorts). I recall that one thing to try is to import 
a template into the FM files that reformats the cross-refs so they 
include the Idref in the cross-ref text. Change the format so this is in 
some delimiters to make it easy to locate .. perhaps "[[<Idref>]]".

Maybe someone can provide you with more useful info.  :o

<sales-pitch>

However .. what I'd suggest is that you download my FM2DITA plugin ..

     http://leximation.com/tools/info/fm2dita.php

Give it a try and see if it does what you need. If nothing else, it may 
give you some tips on conversion table development and ideas for tools 
that you can develop in-house. It's chock full of utilities that will 
make your conversion process easier.

</sales-pitch>

Also .. there's Mif2Go which costs less and once you get things set up, 
will basically "just work".

Remember that one of the reasons to use DITA is to leverage to tools 
that already exist rather than needing to create your own. No need to 
reinvent the wheel, right?

Cheers,

...scott



On 12/8/13 2:00 PM, rebecca officer wrote:
> Hi everyone
> We're currently in the process of converting from Unstructured 
> FrameMaker files to DITA using FrameMaker 11.
> The engineer who's working on the conversion has a question about 
> cross-references. When he structures the document using the conversion 
> table, he'd like to be able to save the Idref value for the 
> cross-reference as an attribute in the element it is wrapped in. At 
> the moment, when he structures the document, all he can manage is to 
> wrap the text in a <xref> element.
> If anyone's got any ideas about how to do this - or about how else 
> to avoid having to manually re-create thousands of cross-refs - I'd be 
> really grateful! The engineer's happy with scripting, esp Python, so 
> it doesn't have to be a purely FM solution.
> Thanks very much,
> Rebecca
>
>
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