Comments on: MIF to the rescue http://www.itauthor.com/2007/05/04/mif-to-the-rescue/ Stuff about technical writing and software Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:58:59 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Michael Müller-Hillebrand http://www.itauthor.com/2007/05/04/mif-to-the-rescue/comment-page-1/#comment-15 Michael Müller-Hillebrand Sat, 05 May 2007 09:01:54 +0000 http://www.itauthor.com/wordpress/2007/05/04/mif-to-the-rescue/#comment-15 Disclaimer: I am a FrameMaker consultant. So you want to do single-sourcing and want to have decent layout in PDF files? How dare you... :-) For single-source workflows I always recommend to start with a classic DTP application including page layout features. It is *a lot* easier to convert such documents into any HTML-based online format (by throwing away all those 'keep with next/previous paragraph', 'start a new page here', 'make a discretionary hyphen there' stuff) than the other way. Even the most advanced XSL-FO programming cannot forsee the intricate layout restrictions of a fixed page size (admitted: unless the layout is highly regular). So, going from RoboHelp, Flare, or other online-help creation tools to print publishing is harder than going from FrameMaker (or Word) to HTML. I am not surprised, - Michael Disclaimer: I am a FrameMaker consultant.

So you want to do single-sourcing and want to have decent layout in PDF files? How dare you... :-)

For single-source workflows I always recommend to start with a classic DTP application including page layout features. It is *a lot* easier to convert such documents into any HTML-based online format (by throwing away all those 'keep with next/previous paragraph', 'start a new page here', 'make a discretionary hyphen there' stuff) than the other way. Even the most advanced XSL-FO programming cannot forsee the intricate layout restrictions of a fixed page size (admitted: unless the layout is highly regular).

So, going from RoboHelp, Flare, or other online-help creation tools to print publishing is harder than going from FrameMaker (or Word) to HTML.

I am not surprised,

- Michael

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