FrameMaker to HTML

[Craig, Alison]

"To evaluate what's cheap, you need to look at total cost of ownership..." In a perfect world, that's true, but the original post began "I work for a small startup..."

My experience in the "small startup" world is that you need to deal with the attitude that the person the company already pays is cheaper than any tool you have to go out and buy with *additional* money. This is, of course, a false economy. But employees don't control the purse strings so they have to work within the employer's reality. 

Alison

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Three signs a *former* programmer I know always wanted to post in his office:

To Marketing: You can tell me what you want or you can tell me when you want it. You can't tell me both!
There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again.
Reality always wins.


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Robert Lauriston
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 12:38 PM
To: Joe Malin; Framers List
Subject: Re: FrameMaker to HTML

To evaluate what's cheap, you need to look at total cost of ownership, not just sticker price. Expensive professional authoring tools can be a good investment if they make you more efficient.

I found ePublisher Pro a lot more flexible and easy to use than RoboHelp.

However, if your goal is merging authored content with javadoc and the like, I'm not sure that FrameMaker can do that. You might want to take a look at HelpStudio and Document!X.

If you're considering moving to DITA, you might be better off dumping FrameMaker in favor of Oxygen XML or AuthorIt. ePublisher Pro at least theoretically allows you to mix and match FrameMaker and DITA source, so that might ease the transition.

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Joe Malin <Joe.Malin at magnet.com> wrote:
> 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.
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