Presented by Thomas Aldous at Documentation and Training West, May 6-9, 2008 in Vancouver, BC Have you thought about converting to XML, but were afraid it was to difficult? Have you talked to consultants who make the process seem long and expensive? Wondering if you should adopt a standard like DITA or go it alone? Well, if you have a laptop, Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 or Adobe FrameMaker 8, and some sample unstructured documents (Word or FrameMaker), we'll walk through the steps that it takes to convert Word and FrameMaker files to XML, using both a custom DTD and using DITA. We will also edit those documents with some of the industry’s leading XML editors. This session is all about getting you started without the hype. Whether you own FrameMaker or not, this session is a good starting place for those thinking of making the move to structured documentation.

1. Thomas Aldous
Th Ald
Integrated Technologies, Inc.
tma@intech.com

2. Import Non Unstructured FrameMaker Documents into Structured
FrameMaker
Clean Documents before structuring
Learn conversion rule syntax
Generate conversion table
Learn how to create conversion table from scratch
Structure current unstructured document
Structure group of unstructured files
Structure unstructured book
What Does it take to Export XML in FrameMaker
Parts of Application File

3. From Structured FrameMaker, open Non
Unstructured FrameMaker Document
Take the d f l f l
k h default filter and choose Convert
d h
If filter fails, open source document in native
application and backward save to a lesser
version.
Retry Open in Structured FrameMaker