Conversion Table alternative

[QuintinSeegers]

Having spent the last two days trying to creat a conversion table to apply structure to our unstructured documents, only to have it apply the correct structure 40% of the time (due to the position of the element in the structure being dependant on the context in which it is used), I'm curious to know if there is an alternative/easier/better way of applying structure to an unstructured document without doing it manually.

[frameexpert]

Conversion tables are quite good; they will not typically get you to 100%, although 40% seems low. I usually start with a solid conversion table, then use scripts to do the rest of the structuring and clean up. There are some cases where a human author will have to decide on how to structure certain cases.

I would strongly suggest that you purchase FrameSLT from West Street Consulting. I use this many times when doing conversions because it allows you to manipulate elements and attributes based on context, etc. It uses the W3C standard XPath to locate specific elements that you want to find and modify. It also has its own built-in "batch language" that allows you to do large amounts of modifications at once.

Here is an old blog post about FrameSLT: http://frameautomation.com/frameslt-a-great-framemaker-plugin/