Translating references, which point to cross-reference marker, to XML

[ejlamsa]

Hello again,

I continue my adventures in wonderful world of FrameMaker and now I have a issue where I couldn't find answer from deep caves of Google.

I have a document that I have generated from XML file through XSL transform, it has markers and id-references and things like that. XML file opens fine in Structured Framemaker and I can save it there to fm-file. ID-references in document work fine and I can cross-reference them easily, problem is that people who will work with this document are old-timers with Framemaker and they want to use unstructured mode, which drops all the IDs and ID-refs off, so instead I have looked cross-reference markers. Markers work fine, issue is how to reference to those markers, couldn't find anywhere instructions. Refering to IDs is well-documented but there is nothing about these. If I make reference element to my fm-document that refers to marker and then save fm file to xml which has fm-file's structure, that reference element disappears and only text stays.

So how do I do this? What will I write to read/write-rules, EDD or somewhere else?

[Van Kurtz]

If your workflow is to import the XML into FrameMaker and then export the FrameMaker file to XML, I do not think you want to drop the structure just so the old-timers can use unstructured FrameMaker. I suggest these old-timers move into the 21st century and learn structured FrameMaker. It is not that difficult to learn.

Van

[ejlamsa]

Well case isn't like that, I'm doing xml->fm->xml only for my own purposes, because that is easiest way to see what kind of code I need to put to my mighty (over 1000 lines) XSLT file to make things work. I have tried to talk about benefits of structured FM to those guys, but they have used something like 15 years unstructured version so they aren't easily converted to light side. They will most likely only use fm-file generated from XML and then do things (that I don't want to know) with it.

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

ejlamsa,

If you have to support people in doing stuff you don’t want to know... well.

You can create non-element cross-references inside structured documents. If you save them to XML you will see the cross-ref markers will appear as process-instructions. But I have no idea whether the XRefSrcText property of the cross-reference itself will appear in the output. If not, you are maybe lost unless you do some preprocessing inside FrameMaker before removing the structure from the documents.

Anyway, for working cross-references the exact content of the XRefSrcText property of the cross-referemnce and the MarkerText property of the cross-ref marker have to match. And of course the XRefFile property muts be set correctly as well…

- Michael

[Russ Ward]

ejlamsa,

I don't think you'll get FrameMaker to do this without some programming or scripting, because I don't believe you can save a non-element-based cross-reference to XML. You'll need to use element-based xrefs, then just before removing the structure, run some sort of script that converts them. This should not be too complicated if you have scripting or FDK experience. If you are using FM10, I imagine ExtendScript could handle this.

I must also say that I concur with the sentiment of the contributers thus far, about the stubborness of these old-timers. When it comes to this stuff, if you think that the same technology you used in 1996 is still the best choice today, you should have retired in 1997.

Russ

[ejlamsa]

Thanks for your answers. Unfortunately I have no scripting or FDK experience, only "normal" programming (c, c++, c#, java, python, xml/xslt) experience, but learning those wouldn't be issue if I need to learn them.

Biggest problem now is that I'm kind of subcontractor and working in different company that these people who will use this thing, so you might understand why I don't want to push too much my opinions about what would be best. Yes, I use FM 10, but they still user FM 9, so there might be some problems as well.

This project is about so that information from some of their product that is generated to one xml should be imported to manual's one chapter and currently that whole book is unstructured, so making structure to it will be a big task, and they haven't yet accepted to translate it to structured form. I hope that in future it will be, since there are big plans to generate the whole book automatically somehow from xml, and I don't think that is possible to do without structure.

E-J

[Russ Ward]

E-J,

I certainly understand your situation and didn't mean to sound critical of you. I wanted to add some comments on this one thing you wrote:

'...I don't think that is possible to do without structure"

It's probably more accurate to say that it will be more logical and scalable if you use structured files. FrameMaker has a very remarkable and versatile feature set for building documents from external sources, including the MIF format and the ability to dynamically build documents right in the interface using the FDK or scripting. So, from your basic description, it does sound like you could pull this off without structure, perhaps even without serious headaches. Having said that, if you are drawing content from XML, it certainly is the natural path to merge that with content in a structured document. So, I would probably say that if you get into the area of automation to handle this process, you might focus the automation on "prepping" the files for the old-timers, after they go through your slick structured processing. That way, you can preserve structure in the book-building process (IMHO a superior method) and in the future, if your end users can handle the structured files, you can just toss out the "automatic unstructuring" part without any consequence.

Russ

[Russ Ward]

Also, I meant to say this... if you do think that you'd like to fix the original cross-reference problem with automation, I'd encourage you to look at ExtendScript in FM10. You could continue to use element-based xrefs until the time that you unstructure the files for your end-users. Then, a simple script could look up all xrefs, change a few properties to make them marker-based, then go to all the targets and insert the necessary markers. You certainly sound savvy enough to figure out how to do this, but if not, there are folks you could pay to write the script for you.

Russ