tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Professionelles Schreiben / Technical Authoring
Applying conversion tables when you have books with a large number
of chapter files can be tricky, especially if some of the chapter files are
generated content which do not require conversion to structured FM.
Also, backup files should be skipped and you do not necessarily want to
overwrite the source files – in case you do need them to check on possible
manual corrections that must be made later. All of these requirements
call for a script that processes a book, moving files out of the way
of the “Structure Documents” command and creating a safe location
for the files to end up in. A fairly simple script can save lots of valuable
time later on.
Post-processing the result
Some features of format-based FM cannot be converted using the builtin
tools. One of these is conditional text. When you select the option to
show all conditional text, none of the markers for that text are visible
and therefore cannot be converted. If you decide on hiding the conditional
text, you will be able to convert the marker to structured FM but
you will loose the content. The only way out of this is converting the
markup-based conditional text into attribute-based conditional text using
a script in the converted document.
Many structural features that may be obvious to the author cannot be
expressed in a conversion table rule at all. Fortunately, there are tools
that let you automate the enhancement of your structured document
based on the properties of elements and the order in which they appear.
The most effective tool for this type of work is West Street Consulting’s
FrameSLT: it makes the power of XSLT available within the environment
of structured FM. This allows you to define an XPath query to find
specific elements or attributes and apply structural transformations on
them. Even though this tool would easily fill an entire tutorial (I will
reapply that tutorial to next year’s tcworld conference) or a full-day
course, I will be showing some examples of its incredible power.
Contact: jang@jang.nl
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tekom-Jahrestagung 2012