Bridging Framemaker and Google Docs for team collaboration

[shawninvancouver]

Hello all,

Our company uses Google docs extensively for all types of documentation.

As the technical writer, I am the odd one out. Now, management tasked me with finding a way to bridge Framemaker [draft] content with Google docs. The reason is to provide the Engineers with a way to review and edit documents on a OS agnostic (and commonly used) platform.

Unfortunately, Google docs isn't making this the least bit easy! In particular, Google docs severely limits PDF to gdocs conversion to about 10 pages. Even using Acrobat's Split Document tool (and then splitting the document into many smaller parts), I am still missing many pages!

This has become a huge dilemma!

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thank you

[Bob_Niland]

> Our company uses Google docs extensively for all types of documentation.

GD just had another outage yesterday.

Pointy-haired-boss says "cloud".

I say "cloud burst".

> Google docs severely limits PDF to gdocs conversion to about 10 pages.

I suspect the Goog doesn't want people draining their servers by using GD as just a tool to convert PDFs to something that can be edited (even though Google itself has probably converted every PDF on the web to HTML, even those that are just pages of raster scans, and those with security set to view-only).

Anyway, since you have already trialed a workflow of FM → PDF → GD, you might look into:

FM → XML → GD (using TCS if you have it)

FM → MIF → DOCX → GD (using MIF2GO, which is now free)

[shawninvancouver]

Hello Error7103

Thank you for your response.

>FM → MIF → DOCX → GD (using MIF2GO, which is now free)

Unfortunately, that doesn't work because it appears that Google's translation from Word (any format) to GD is near 100% inept! I've basically given up trying to get a decent usable Word to GD translation.

>FM → XML → GD (using TCS if you have it)

This is intriguing but I am unclear how to go from XML to GD. Google only supports .doc, .docx, .dot, .html, plain text (.txt), and .rtf.

At this point I am doubting that Google can properly translate any document to GD format... so I am still left wondering if there is a 3rd party conversion tool available?

Thanks,

Shawn

[Bob_Niland]

> This is intriguing but I am unclear how to go from XML to GD.

According to the ever iffy wiki, GD supports input of Office Open XML. Whether FM's XML export could be conformed to that is not known to me.

> At this point I am doubting that Google can properly translate any document to GD format.

So management has mandated use of what amounts to developmental formats, based on typical MS cruft "standards", that are ultimately only supported by the Goog, and only in the cloud, when the skies aren't severe clear.

Faced with this task, my top priority would be making sure my CV was up to date.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

I've just got to LOL and ROTL!!! Error7103 you are classic!

[shawninvancouver]

Error7103 wrote:

Faced with this task, my top priority would be making sure my CV was up to date.

Well that would be a rather severe punishment. I'm not worried about that.

I just hate to fail at something. I thought I could find a solution that would involve Google Docs but I am quickly learning that this product is still truly inept, at least in regards to importing documents.

I am currently experimenting with alternative (non Google) solutions. One alternative is using Adobe Acrobat's Shared Review tool. Except, I cannot figure out what kind of Web Server folder is accepted by Adobe Acrobat. I've trying my own personal webserver (a folder with full permissions), Google Docs folder, Adobe's Creative Cloud storage... everything I tried, resulted in the same error, "The Shared Folder Location provided is not valid. Click OK and check the Status field for more information". I don't even know where the "Status field" is located.

All this trouble sure illustrates the greatness of Microsoft's Sharepoint server when it was my collaboration tool.

Thanks