Selecting DITA domains in FrameMaker 8

Report · Nov 20, 2008

I have looked for ways to select the appropriate DITA domains in FrameMaker 8 but have not found anything in the Help or on the online Adobe resources. In other editors, I can select domains (or rather, suppress some of them) so that my list of applicable elements is filtered to what is useful in my context.
Does anybody know whether this feature of suppressing domains is available at all in FM 8 ?

Thanks for any advice.

Jang

Report · Nov 20, 2008

Hi Jang...

With FM, the content model is defined by the EDD (and DTD) of the selected structure application. For ease of use, the default DITA Topic structure application is based on the ditabase.dtd which includes all of the DITA domains. If you want to strictly focus on a specific domain (set of elements), you'd need to develop your own structure application that is based on the model you want to work with. If you do this, then you switch between these domains by selecting the associated structure application when opening a file.

Note that with DITA, the Topic, Map, and Book structure applications are also set in the DITA Options dialog. These apps are used when FM opens a DITA file through the course of automatically resolving a reference (topicref, conref, xref) since there is no opportunity to manually select the application to use. If you do develop domain-specific apps, you'll probably have a bit of extra work because you'll need to change these apps in Options as well.

If you just want to reduce the number of elements (or eliminate specific domains from the "Topic" content model), you can modify the EDD to eliminate these elements. This will make it so these elements are not exposed as being available when authoring in FM. If you do make modifications to the default EDD (or other application files) it is strongly recommended that you clone the apps to create new application names of your own. This way, *when* you mess something up (and you will .. we all do) you'll be able to refer back to a fully functional app.

Cheers,

...scott

Report · Nov 21, 2008

Thanks, Scott.

Although this was a very helpful and clear answer, FrameMaker is less so, apparently. I was hoping for something more along the line of other DITA authoring environments, where you can blend in and blend out elements belonging to specific domains. On the fly, and if you need them for another topic in the same project, you just blend them in again. Oh well, you can't have it all, they say ;-)

Ciao from Amsterdam

Jang

Report · Nov 24, 2008

Hi Jang...

This is definitely a weakness in FM. If you do need to have the ability to swap in modifications to the content model and support specializations frequently, FM may not be the tool for you.

This may be a rationalization, but I like to compare the effort required to set up FM for a custom data model to that needed to prepare an XSL-FL stylesheet to publish content from that model. FM requires the effort up front .. just to be able to author the content, but once you've done that you can publish to PDF immediately. While, authoring tools that can easily adapt for a new model, get you authoring quickly, but you'll actually spend more time setting up the PDF output later on. It's a trade-off and really depends on where you want to spend your time and money. (If PDF output is a requirement, the FM route will most likely cost less if you take the full authoring/publishing workflow into account.)

Cheers,

...scott

Report · Nov 25, 2008

Well,

since setting up any structured environment in FrameMaker includes dealing with the EDD, you could take advantage of conditional text in the EDD document to include/exclude certain parts of the structure.

Or vice versa: Have different EDDs that join common parts in form of text insets.

For a certain project/customer/product you usually have a defined, fixed EDD, but if you want to support multiple projects/customers/products with similar structures this might be an option.

- Michael