questions re Structured FM7.2 to FM11

[Heiko Haida]

Hi Cheryl, 

as Matt and Scott have already mentioned, there are differences, but you
should be able to work with your old files and get some result, at
least. 

FrameMaker works with Unicode characters since FM 8. Some older settings
for characters - iso characters in the r/w rules, prefix/suffix entries
(EDD) or numbering formats/reference definitions (in the templates) -
may have to be updated or modified. You have to be aware of that if you
convert FM 7.2-files. 

FM 11 now supports XSLT 2. Of course, XSLT 1-templates should still
work. 

As you know, the structured environment consists mainly of the following
parts/files: 

structured application definition file = structapps.fm
read/write-rules file
DTD and entity definitions
EDD
Template(s) with imported EDD 

In your structapps.fm, you define the file paths for all necessary
files. All files except the DTD itself are genuine FrameMaker files.
First, you should make sure that the structapps.fm is of the newest
version. Create a new structapps.fm with FM 11 and copy (only) the
application entries of the old FM 7.2-file into it (via the
structure-view window), without the header.
All other files should at least be opened and saved with FM 11. 

If you can get some How-to-instructions for FM 8 or FM 9, these will
also be helpful for FM 11. 

Manuals are available from the Adobe Website. Look for "FM structure
application developer guide" and "reference". We just had a discussion
on "frameusers" about this and it seems, that in fact the newest
versions of these manuals were released with FM 9 (which is pretty long
time ago...). 

The FM 11 online help is here: 
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/WSd817046a44e105e21e63e3d11ab7f73d53-8000.html


You can get infos on some commercial sites for free too, eg. here:
http://wiki.scriptorium.com./tiki-index.php 

Good luck - 

Tino H. Haida, Berlin 

dwyercl2 at verizon.net: 

> Background: My company recently purchased FM11 and after using FM7.2 forever, I'm now learning my way around FM11 one-day-at-a-time. I had created structured FM7.2 files and was working on round-tripping them to-XML-and-back several years ago, when we were "overtaken by events" and I never did get the XSLT stylesheets worked out. 
> 
> Present: In opening my old FM7.2 structured files, I'm finding all the work I did on creating EDDs and other special files for XML pretty much obsolete or so it seems. (The structure dev guide was a huge help back then...) Is there a magic bullet or two that I can use to be able to re-use the 34-page EDD (lots of thought and work put into that way-back-when), or should I just start over from scratch and let FM11 do the heavy lifting that the marketing blurbs on it says it will do? 
> 
> Any pitfalls I should be aware of? Advice? Books I should get? Is there a FM11 structure dev guide available? Any help or suggestions are welcome! 
> 
> Thanks!
> Cheryl Dwyer 
> 
> Lead Tech Writer
> Industrial Medium Software, Inc.
> McLean, VA
 
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