Adobe FrameMaker Webinars

XMetaL have been doing a lot of work on DITA over the last few months. I'm still waiting to hear what Madcap are doing about putting DITA support into Flare. But in the meanwhile, Adobe have surprised a lot of people (me included) by announcing and - more importantly - demonstrating their FrameMaker DITA Application Pack, which adds a DITA menu to FrameMaker 7.2.

To date this hasn't yet been released, but it's due for a beta release this month (which I guess means by the end of this month). It consists of two DLLs, an EDD file, a DTD for DITA, read/write rules, structure files and documentation (including online help created using the application pack).

The demo of the application pack (by Adobe's FrameMaker evangalist, RJ Jacquez) is a Macromedia Breeze webinar. You can access it at:
www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=list&loc=en_us&type=ondemand_seminar&product=FrameMaker

Unfortunately, the picture and the sound on the webinar get out of sync and it's a little difficult to follow, but the demo is excellent and shows that Adobe are putting a serious effort into making FrameMaker a DITA authoring tool. I assume (and I hope) this is stage 1 in an effort that includes integration with RoboHelp, so that you can open your DITA source in either FrameMaker or RoboHelp, edit it and output it to Help or PDF as required. Once that's done the RoboHelp/FrameMaker combination will serious shore up the churn from RoboHelp to Flare (which I'm part of, being a recent Flare convert).

What the demo shows is full working use of DITA (with the exception of the Ant Build menu option, which he admits they haven't got working yet). And the fact that Adobe are eating their own dog food and currently using this to produce their own documentation demonstrates that they're taking FrameMaker seriously again as a live product.

I have done so much work in the mxDocBook EDD that I've created (and continue to tweak) that I can see they've done a great deal of work to get to where they are. The thing that amazed me with FrameMaker 7.0 was that Adobe didn't supply a working demo EDD and templates to show you what you could do with Structured FrameMaker - you had to start from scratch and do it all yourself, and let me tell you that involved a large number of man hours to get to a state where you could just write the documents! Now it looks like the Application Pack will provide all of that missing stuff for DITA - making a switch from DocBook to DITA more enticing than ever.

More good news is that the Application Pack is promised as a free download for registered FrameMaker 7.2 users.

Madcap's Frame-compatible Flare is due out in September. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with to stop Frame/RoboHelp users from sitting tight and waiting for next year's version of RoboHelp.

Screenshots

1. The Application Pack DLLs add a "DITA" menu to FrameMaker:

2. There is an Options dialog box for the DITA structure applications:

3. Here a topic reference has been added to the ditamap and the map file is now being updated. In screenshot 4 you'll see that the topic title has been updated in the ditamap:

4. A new topic is being added. The file that's created will be called GettingStarted.dita and a reference to this file will be automatically placed in the ditamap at the point shown by the Structure View on the right side of the screenshot:

5. This is the online help currently being written for the Application Pack (aka the DITA+FM Plugin). At the bottom of the ditamap you'll see a reftable that creates topic references from several topics to a reference page:

6. One of the best things about DITA is that it's built for reuse of small sections of text as well as whole topics. To reuse a section it must have a unique ID. The FrameMaker DITA Application gives you a menu option that will automatically assign an ID that is guaranteed to be unique for this project to currently selected section. The DITA options allow you to specify an ID prefix (see screenshot 2) which means you can give each project a unique prefix, ensuring uniqueness of IDs across projects:

7. Now you're in another topic. You've given the section you want to reuse an ID, so you can now insert it into the selected point in the current topic (provided it's valid here - and, in this case, you can see from the Elements catalogue, bottom right, that it is valid to add a section element here):

8. In the Reference Manager you choose a source file and select "section" as the element you want to link by reference. The right pane shows all section elements in the chosen file that have IDs:

9. If you want, you can display all elements and assign an ID here, so that you can add a reference. Clicking insert adds the reference to the section in the other file. The section is displayed in the current file but is only here by reference. The actual text remains in the original file: