How to generate .ditamap from the outline with execl worksheet

[Guest]

Dear all,

I am working a new documentation development, and completed the outline with execl worksheet.

Is it possible to generate .ditamap automatically based on the execl worksheet?

If so, how ?

ps: the tool version is FM10

Thanks in advance.

[ScottPrentice]

Hi Vicky...

I'm not aware of any built-in options for generating a DITA map from an Excel worksheet or other external files. You could write an ExtendScript to do it, but it would require some development effort.

DITA-FMx provides a command to generate a map and "stub" topic files from a text file. It wouldn't be too hard to export the Excel worksheet to text file and fix it up to be a format that can be used for this purpose ..

     http://docs.leximation.com/dita-fmx/2.0/?ditafmx_ref_listtomap.html

Cheers,

…scott

Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com

[Guest]

Hi Scott~~

Thank you very much for your time.

Yes, What I want is to automatically generate ditamap and blank topics seperately from the same outline with execl formats. Mostly, when developing a new documentation, I perfer to design the outline and then add contents based on each topic.

According to your kindly reminder, it it truly embedded in VBA or Javascript so as to make it successful. But, it is complicated. I'd like to refer to  Dita-FMx you provided for any fit solutions.

[ScottPrentice]

Hi Vicky...

Yes .. an alternative is to create a VBA script in Excel that generates a map and stub files from the worksheet. This is fairly simple if you have someone available to do that scripting. This scripting can be done in various languages .. whatever is preferred by the developer. It doesn't need to be done in FrameMaker, just needs to be able to read the Excel file (or something that you export from Excel), and create a map and topic files based on that info.

Cheers,

…scott