Docbook bookfile

[Alan Houser]

Whoa ... FrameMaker has "supported" Docbook for many releases. But the 
support is generally poor, and is for a relatively ancient version of 
DocBook (4.1).

Anybody who attempts to use FrameMaker for a real Docbook-based workflow 
(particularly for authoring) is in for a lot of hurt. Which is a shame, 
given the alignment of most Docbook use cases (long PDF docs) with 
perhaps FrameMaker's most appealing strength (long PDF docs).

To address Wim's original issue, I've always been frustrated/baffled by 
FrameMaker's XML "book" handling (converting each component file to an 
XML entity). Thinking out loud, it may be possible to create a "shell" 
XML file that maintains book components using XSLT's 'document()' and 
'result-document()' functions. But you would probably not retain the 
features of the FrameMaker book file.

In an ideal world, one could take a vendor's feature list at face value. 
But that is not our world.

-Alan
---

Alan Houser
Group Wellesley, Inc.
Consultant and Trainer, Technical Publishing
arh on Twitter
412-450-0532

On 11/21/14, 11:37 AM, Robert Lauriston wrote:
> I doubt there are many FrameMaker DocBook users, since support was
> just added in FM12. In structured mode it should not convert XML to
> .fm.
>
> If you don't have FM12, I suggest downloading an eval copy.
>
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 12:42 AM, Wim Hooghwinkel - idtp <wim at idtp.eu> wrote:
>> Now when I open a docbook book file in FM, FM converts it directly to a FM
>> book. All XML files are converted to fm files. That’s not what I want.
>