tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Professionelles Schreiben / Technical Authoring
TA 16
Tutorial
Crossing the divide – Advanced techniques
for conversion to structured FrameMaker
Jang F.M. Graat, JANG Communication, Amsterdam
Most of the techniques that will be explained in this tutorial were developed
in a project for one of my customers, who will be co-presenting
that project with me in TA5: Changing the engine without stopping the
car.
Preparing the documents
Some features of the unstructured FM interface do not translate well
into the structured paradigm. In fact, some features break FM’s builtin
conversion and cause a fatal crash. This means that such features
have to be either removed or changed in such a way that FM can handle
them properly.
One particular case is anchored frames that contain text frames. In one
project, such frames were used to place notes for the authors in the side
heads. A script finds all occurrences of such constructions and moves
the content into the main document, applying specific paragraph format
tags so that they can be recognized for what they are. After conversion,
the re-applied paragraph formats makes the notes appear in the side
heads again.
Another feature does not lead to crashes but offers an opportunity to increase
the quality of converted materials: the use of different sidehead
icons for different types of notes. If the images are linked instead of
copied into the FM documents, their filenames can be used to apply new
paragraph formats to the note texts. This allows distinguishing an „Info“
note from a „Caution“ and „Warning“, or whatever note categories you
may have. Again, after conversion, the icons can be brought back into
the formatting (using a slightly different and easier to manage method).
Conversion tables and their usage
The information about creating conversion tables in FM’s documentation
is more or less enough to do the straightforward conversion work.
But the really interesting work starts where the documentation ends.
Higher-level conversion rules can be applied until reaching the very top
of the tree. The order in which certain rules are applied may become an
obstacle if you do not have a clear idea of the structure that is inherent
in the source document’s formatting.
Creating complex expressions at higher-level rules can be made less
error-prone by using variables for sets of elements that often appear
together. You can go one step further by using text insets to create and
manage a set of conversion tables: each conversion table being specifically
optimized for one type of document. The tutorial, procedure and
reference chapters may have different structures and can be converted
using different conversion tables. Also, if you are a consultant like myself,
you may want to use a number of modules that can be combined
into a fitting conversion table for each particular customer, without having
to copy and paste generic enhancements for often occurring formats
and constructions.
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