Linking to content on a Wiki

[sselberg]

Hi All,

I'm working with a team that presently uses Framemaker to create product documentation.  In order to get better collaboration with the designers, we want to author the content on a wiki (Confluence).  The end target is a pdf - and we're researching if we can generate the pdf directly from Confluence; however, it seem to fall short in a number of areas.  Confluece has a nice REST API that I can use to pull the structured content.  Is there any way to have Framemaker import the content from a uri or script rather than a file?

Thanks in advance for your time.

[cudspan]

The short answer is, Yeah...  Sure.  If you have Maker 11 or later (I think that's where it starts) then you can use javascript to do it -- use Adobe ExtendScript to implement a call to the WIKI and pull the content in.

The long answer is in the details...  It depends on how you want to identify what and where to import, the WIKI API, your ability to make these connections (I've never tried implementing AJAX from FrameMaker, for example...  But I don't see why it wouldn't work.  Well come to think of it, I'm not sure how to include a lib like jQuery in an extend script...), and your understanding of how Maker insets work.

You would need to look at the FDK documentation because the ExtendScript docs don't actually get into the particulars of the Maker document model -- the ExtendScript object reference is (to put it nicely) minimalist.

I look forward to this thread growing...

[sselberg]

Hmmm, If the Framemaker scripting paradigm is like the InDesign one, that could be a difficult road.  I wrote a script for creating calendars in InDesign (InDesign Calendar Wizard), and I'm trying to think how I would accomplish this task there.  I think some placeholder that doesn't get printed but has the url (or parameters) would be required.  In InDesign, I think I could label the text frame - not sure what the parallel would be in Frame.  Then the script would need to be executed and scan the document for labeled frames and replace the content with what is in the Wiki.  In InDesign, I think that would be really ugly as the text frames are fixed - but in frame that may not be too horrible.  I'll have to give it a bit more thought.

-Scott

[cudspan]

You should look closer at FrameMaker.  You would handle this as a text inset, I suspect.  Another approach would be to set special markers in the document, and give the WIKI request spec in the marker text.  It may even be that Maker implements text insets in some way similar to that...  I kind of forget (it's been a while since I had to do text insets programmatically).  If you can make the connection to your WIKI, I say getting it into Maker would not be as hard as you think.

[LDSchneider]

Hello!

I've researched extensively the use of Confluence as a source for output. This does not directly answer your question, but it may help others who ended up here searching for a Confluence to PDF solution.

* It's basically not possible to have engineer-collaborators (non-tech writers) tag things correctly/consistently enough in Confluence.

* Confluence has a lot of bugs and it generates horrible, dirty, inconsistent HTML.

* Confluence does not (consistently) support CSS 3, only 2.1 plus some undocumented features of 3. See the discussion here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/PDF-Export-Confluence-does-not-support-CSS...

* Confluence tables are a disaster, within Confluence and exported from it.

In short, you'll need to go from Confluence to [something], then fix the messes, then to PDF. I've been using [Word] for now, but would strongly prefer [FrameMaker].

Sorry, that doesn't answer your exact question, but hopefully will save others some time. I'll look into the scripting answer here for going Confluence to FM: that'll help a bit if I can get it to work.

[Russ Ward]

Hi sselberg,

It is possible to make an HTTP call from ExtendScript and incorporate the response data in a FrameMaker document. I have a sample here:

http://www.weststreetconsulting.com/WSC_ExtendScriptSamples.htm

Some advisories... the interface is very low level and primitive, at least it was back when I developed the sample. And I don't know if it properly supports things like TLS (HTTPS), etc. But with some patience, it did work.

Russ