Preserving Chapter Cross References when going to Structured Framemaker

[_James_McKay_]

Hello,

I am trying to preserve all of my cross references that link from chapter to chapter, within the same book. If I convert files one at a time, then FrameMaker has trouble finding the link in the destination chapter - because that chapter has not yet been converted to Structured FrameMaker.

I have not tried Batch Processing, but I am sure I would get the same results.

With that said, what must I do to these external chapter cross references, so that they convert over to Structured FrameMaker?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Regards,

Jim

[frameexpert]

Hi Jim,

Once you convert all of the files, then see if the external cross-references work. You need to determine why they are unresolved.

When converting unstructured to structured files, I often use FrameScript to help me cleanup various problems, including unresolved cross-references.

Rick Quatro
585-659-8267
rick at frameexpert dot com

[_James_McKay_]

Hi Rick,

Thanks once again for the info.

Jim

[Russ Ward]

Jim,

I have done lots of conversions and every time had to manually redirect cross-references. It seems to be just the way it is. The conversion table process attempts to do it but I've never had it work in any remotely suitable fashion.

Russ

[_Van_Kurtz_]

Jim,

Like Russ, I have had to redirect the cross-references manually following conversion; HOWEVER, I have also noticed that existing IDs in the unstructured version seem to get put into the converted element as an attribute. In other words, if my EDD defines a Title element with an Id attribute and the unstructured document contains a title paragraph that is the target of a cross-reference, then upon conversion the corresponding Title element has TWO attributes, one is named Id and the other ID. Id has no value, but ID does. The structured document does not validate and I have to delete the ID attribute to make it validate.

This leads me to believe that had I named the attribute ID in my EDD, then it would be assigned a value upon conversion; however, I have never tried this. If I had, FrameMaker would likely create the Title element with two attributes, both named ID!!!

Take it for what it is worth,
Van

[Russ Ward]

Van,

To the best of my knowledge, the structure generator is hardcoded to use a certain name for the ID attribute, perhaps "ID" as you suggest. I forget. In any case, this is one of its limitations, along with the fact that it always seems to pick the wrong element on which to assign the ID. So, I always just clear out everything that gets automatically assigned and just fix things by hand.

A small hassle, I think, for an otherwise outstanding utility.

Russ

[frameexpert]

For small projects, you can fix these cross-references by hand as Russ and Van mentioned. But if you have a large number of documents and fixing them by hand is not feasible, this can be fully automated with FrameScript. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I wanted to make it clear that doing them by hand is not the only option.

Rick Quatro
rick at frameexpert dot com
585-659-8267

[_James_McKay_]

Thanks for the input. It is appreciated.

Regards,

Jim