Framemaker Crashing When Creating Element List from EDD

Russ,

Thanks for the reply. Great question.

Ideally, we'd love to be able to round-trip between Word and Framemaker, but a number of factors prevent us from doing this. We publish well over 100 documents, all of which are authored and revised by rotating committees of volunteers. The base documents are created in MS Word by our authors, then sent to our Publications staff for layout/editing in Framemaker, after which PDFs are produced from FM.

We're a membership organization. Our authors are our members, and they typically have considerable latitude in how they manage their publication files. In the past, they've resisted working from templates or using Web interfaces—basically anything that would allow us to harmonize input around a standard set of markup. To further complicate matters, the rules and procedures under which authoring committees operate are managed by a department separate from Publishing, so we, as editors and designers, are only able to impose bare-minimum mandates:

(1) Docs must come to us in MS Word format.

(2) Docs must adhere to a standard organizational format (i.e., section, figure, table, equation numbering).

Even with round-tripping off the table, there are a couple of very good reasons to try and implement Structured Authoring in Framemaker. First, we partner with a contractor to implement an interactive, Web-based version of one of our most high-profile and ubiquitous publications. Right now, with each revision of this document, our contractor has to engineer an XML/HTML framework from scratch using the most recent PDFs and Unstructured FM files, which is time consuming, expensive, and subject to error. Second, it's imperative that we're able to provide authoring committees with "clean" (i.e., most recent) versions of published versions of their documents to use as bases for future revisions. Right now we have to cobble together Word files converted from PDF or copy/pasted from Framemaker, and the amount of formatting information lost during conversion is unacceptable to us and to our authors (and the resulting docs sometimes barely usable).

I'm essentially our in-house Framemaker authority, but my experience is almost exclusively with Unstructured Framemaker. I'm reasonably tech-savvy, but my practical experience with XML/SGML is minimal, and my experience with Unstructured Framemaker is nil. We're not currently budgeted to contract this work, so I'm trying to determine exactly what we need to do to fulfill our basic needs (#1 and #2 above) with the resources at our disposal.

M