The Frame roundtrip revisited – briefly

After a long stretch writing online help, I'm now back to using FrameMaker. I wrote a large structured document in FrameMaker 7.0 last year, and subsequently persuaded my company to buy version 7.1, early this year, but since then I haven't had a chance to use 7.1 for structured documents because the only manual I've worked on since then is a legacy unstructured document that started life in FrameMaker 5.5.

I did a great deal of work last year trying to get FrameMaker 7.0 to do three things:

a) Roundtrip without losing anything along the way.
b) Store documents as XML that validates against the xDocBook DTD.
c) Store documents as XML, that uses standard DocBook elements for things like index references and cross-references.

Frame 7.0 failed on all accounts, but now (from a brief tryout this afternoon) version 7.1 seems to do part a) successfully, and will, I'm pretty sure, do b) too.

I don't think it will ever do part c) successfully, because it uses processing instructions like for cross-references etc. However, I'm sure I could use XSLT to transform FrameMaker XML output into standard DocBook XML, should the need arise. More useful, probably, would be an XSL transformation to turn DocBook into FrameMaker XML for importing into FrameMaker, as this would allow programmers to write documentation in DocBook markup, including cross-refs and index refs, using standard DocBook elements, and I could (after transforming it) pull their work straight into Frame for editing, polishing and output to PDF.

Two bug-bears of mine with FrameMaker 7.0 were that I had to invent a very contrived way of doing conditional text, and I couldn't get literal text to output properly to XML at all.

Fixing conditional text was Adobe's main selling point of 7.1, and formed the bedrock of my case for spending company money on buying the upgrade. However, I still need to see whether literal text survives the roundtrip.

But I was very pleasantly surprised this afternoon when I took a chapter from the structured manual I wrote last year - created in FrameMaker 7.0 - saved it to XML, using the Save As option, then opened the resulting XML document and it came back looking just like it had when I opened the original .fm file.

Another good step closer to my goal of storing documenation as XML source, so that we can maintain it in a CVS repository, and so that non-FrameMaker users can make use of it and can contribute documentation that we can use within FrameMaker.