Converting DITA to framemaker

[montana321]

New to DITA. Investigating structured framemaker to see if it's something we should pursue at my company.

We are on framemaker 2017.

I've created a few sample chapters in DITA and have saved these as PDF, which is the main format we'll be targeting.

But I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to export a dita book that mirrors the look and feel of the technical manuals we currently produce in unstructured framemaker.

Can someone point me in the direction of resources/tutorials on how I'd go about doing this? 

[Amitoj]

Yes, simply choose the Book with components option when generating Ditamap to PDF.

FRAMEMAKER 11: Easy PDF output from DITAMap - YouTube

Hoping this is helpful.

[montana321]

Had stumbled upon that already.

My issue was that when I save it as book with components it doesn't retain any of the framemaker formatting/master pages/styling that you'd see when you open one of our current manuals.  For example, usually are technical manuals have a two column layout, versus one.

[Amitoj]

for that you would need to change the template in sts file for chapter.

[montana321]

Do you mean the EDD?

I could adjust the EDD in the dita template file to get the title, paragraph, notes, etc. the way they do in the original unstructured file. (which is what I think you're saying).

However, I'm not getting how the dita file would be smart enough to select the right master page. We usually go with two column documents. However, there are plenty of times where you need both columns/full page. For example if you have a large image or a table.

So let's say I have all my dita topic and task files with EDD that reflects my original unstructured format. How do I take those and create a pdf book that looks like the original with the same master pages.