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M
MPants_512
Participant
February 28, 2013
Question

Is FM capable of processing sequences?

  • February 28, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 891 views

From what I have seen about ditamaps, I should be able to specify a collection-type, such as sequence, on a topicref in a map. This would hopefully end up being processed so that the children of that topicref have next step and previous step links in them. More than that I would like for the parent to have an ordered list of links to all of the children. I am a bit afraid of the answer, but before even trying to figure out how to do this, I am wondering if I can. As of now when I save the ditamap as an FM Book with Components, I am not seeing this behavior. Thanks in advance for any help.

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1 reply

ScottPrentice
ScottPrentice
Inspiring
February 28, 2013

Hi MPants...

That's the processing defined for HTML-based builds through the DITA Open Toolkit. Next/Previous linking is not typically used for PDF publishing (through the OT or otherwise). This is not something that FM-based publishing is set up to do by default.

Providing a list of links to child topics *is* something that's not uncommon in print/PDF, but it also is not part of the default map to book processing done by FM.

If you need this sort of publishing, you'll need to create the processes (likely, FDK plugin or ExtendScript) to accomplish it.

Cheers,

...scott

M
MPants_512Author
Participant
March 1, 2013

Scott,

Thank you for all of your help. In short, my desired output is ultimately an html build. I have been working by publishing through TCS 4 to HTML5 using the publish option in FM. From what I can tell, FM is converting the ditamaps I am publishing through the FM Book with Components Process, but I can't say that I am sure of this. My hope was to avoid hard coding as many links as possible.

From what you wrote above, is it safe for me to assume I am going to need to use the FM Dita-OT plug in to get the results I am looking for in the shortest amount of time possible? If so, and I realize I am getting a bit out of the scope of the original post, after I generate and HTML-based build through the Open Toolkit, will I be able to create a reasonable workflow to keep Robohelp involved in order to use the SharePoint integration and HTML5 capabilities?

Arnis Gubins
Arnis Gubins
Inspiring
March 1, 2013

As an aside, if you already have your content in DITA, why not look at using Dita2go (freebie) or DITA for Publishers to create your HTML? They've got a number of options and are a bit more user-friendly/better documented than the OTK.

Dita2go: http://dita2go.com/

DITA for publishers: http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net/

If you neeed to create On-line Help formats, the Dita2go product has this capability. However, if you need extra complexity in your workflow, RoboHelp also "supports" the importing of ditamaps to gnerate xhtml output.

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