Cross-references through Framemaker?

[Carl Anderson <cea@ncipher.com>]

Hi all,

I've been lurking quite a while and reading, but now find I need to post a 
question ....

My docs team writes manuals in XML using docbook, and we pour this through 
FrameMaker 7 to produce PDFs using Frame's template/EDD 
configuration.  This set-up allowed us to migrate easily from an 
all-FrameMaker environment to one in which we can work with DocBook XML 
(much better for us) while being able to take advantage of Framemaker's 
strengths in producing good-looking PDFs that looked like the PDFs we 
produced from our earlier all-Framemaker set-up.

However, we've had some difficulty getting things to behave the way we'd 
like, and we're not always sure where we're running into limitations on 
what Frame can do with XML (of which, of course, there are a number!), 
where we're screwing up, or some combination of these problems :)  One of 
our particular difficulties is trying to get cross-references working in 
our output PDFs.

What we we think we need is a tranformation that converts olinks (with a 
targetdocent specified) into cross-references that link to the target 
entity.  We've played with this a bit, but without much success so far. It 
would be useful to know if there's a tried-and-tested way of doing this 
before we spend a lot of time barking up the wrong tree.  Alternatively, it 
would be useful to know if xrefs to linkends outside the source file are 
the usual way to do cross-references.  Do anyone have any experience with 
this sort of thing?

Cheers,
Carl


--
Carl E. Anderson  mailto:cea@ncipher.com  http://www.ncipher.com/
nCipher Corporation Ltd.   +44 1223 723690   Fax: +44 1223 723601