[Framers] xref from FM file created by DITA-FMx to unstructured Frame?

[Lin Sims]

No. I'm not sure I've ever even heard of that, or at least not enough to
connect it to Excel spreadsheets. I'll look into it, but we do have a
pretty good automation in place now.

No, our previous process was to take a very large and annoyingly formatted
set of spreadsheets used by the designers/engineers, convert it to Word to
break up the individual tables, and then copying and pasting those tables
over into Frame, then using Rick Quattro's TableCleaner to fix the
formatting for the initial version, then updating later versions by using a
utility that diffed two versions of the designer/engineer spreadsheets and
making changes manually.

As you can imagine, this was subject to error.

One day I was complaining about this to one of my tech writer coworkers,
who proceeded to write me a ruby script that took the old spreadsheets and
converted them into something I could use. It was on the quick and dirty
side, there was still a fair bit of reformatting involved and I still had
to make the manual updates, but it was a massive time saver (I went from
2-3 days' worth of work to about 10 minutes in the conversion alone.)

More recently, one of our full-time perl scripters was asked to write a set
of scripts that convert an Excel spreadsheet in a corporate-standard format
to a number of different outputs for the engineers and, for the writers,
XML files and a ditamap that, with Scott's product, becomes a very nicely
formatted chapter with tables and things. Since I use the script every time
the source file is updated, the information in my document is always an
exact match for the source.

At any rate, as I think I said in an earlier email, it turns out all I need
to remember is to be working on the server in the actual structured
environment and it works. Just using the structured interface on my local
install doesn't, and that's where I went wrong.



On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
wrote:

> This sounds like a job for FrameMaker's database publishing feature.
> Or was that your previous process?
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 5:18 AM, Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Oh, it's worse than that. The XML files that generate the FM file via
> > DITA-FMx are regenerated every time there's a change in the source
> document
> > for them, because the XML files are created from a perl script that takes
> > apart an Excel file to create individual XML files for each row in the
> > Excel file. I already have an xref going from a standard FM file to a
> > location in the generated FM file that has to be replaced.
> >
> > And believe it or not, this is actually a VAST improvement on our
> previous
> > process, which involved me checking thousands of rows individually for
> > changes so I could update a standard FM file, which was prone to a lot of
> > errors.
>



-- 
Lin Sims