FrameMaker to HTML

[Joe Malin]

Hi!

I work for a small startup that delivers documentation to software developers. I’m investigating how to continue our strategy of publishing to HTML so that we can “merge” our reference documentation (such as Javadoc) with our developer guides, samples, and so forth.

Our legacy is unstructured FrameMaker 12, which I’d prefer to continue for the moment. We use FrameMaker’s multi-publishing feature to output to Responsive HTML5, using the RoboHelp features that come with FM. However, this approach isn’t customizable, as far as I can tell. I’m sure to get pressure to make our docs conform to the rest of the company’s design philosophy.

How should I proceed? Full RoboHelp would probably give us the customization we need without a lot of work, but RoboHelp is very expensive. We could go to structured FM and convert XML to HTML5 using XSLT (I was a software engineer in a past life, so I don’t find this troubling), but it’s a lot of work. Going to a different content/publishing solution would take some ‘splaining, since we’ve already invested in FM 12. But, if it were cheap enough, we could consider it.

I should add that we use Git for CMS. This approach actually works pretty well, since our goal is to track versions and branches rather than save space or do line-by-line reviews. For reviews, we’re currently using Acrobat XI features based on tagged PDF from FM 12.

Thoughts? I would be grateful for any advice!

Joe
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