Mixed Structured / Unstructured and xrefs

[Jang F.M. Graat]

Lin,

First remark, which of course you have figured out yourself: the person who decided to move from structured to unstructured FM should have his head examined (after being fired by the ones even higher in command who no longer want to waste their money). The engineers that complain about not being able to work in structured FM and preferring unstructured should also be fired, as their unstructured attitude will almost certainly lead to crappy product design in their own field of work.

That said, there is a way to use structured and unstructured FM in the same file and I have succesfully done it. You should NOT use the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V keys as that will bring the content in through the clipboard and as Scott mentioned that operation will usually cause all kinds of nasty conversions to happen, which you want to avoid.

In my case, the specs for an API was delivered as a set of DITA files, generated from the source code by automated scripts (i.e. much the same way that you describe your process). The descriptive part of the specs had always been in unstrucured FM and is too large and unorganized to be converting everything to structured FM or DITA.

The DITA files, saved as structured FM files, were inserted into the unstructured FM files as text insets. There were index markers as well as cross-references and they all survived this insertion. Also, auto-generation of the ToC worked well across the entire file including all the text insets. The text insets were not made editable, as that defeats the purpose of generating them by an automated process. But they are getting updated automatically when the entire book is updated.

Let us know whether this method works for you.

Kind regards from Amsterdam

Jang

JANG Communication
Technical Documentation Specialist
Amsterdam - Netherlands
Cell +31 6 4685 4996
http://www.jang.nl