noting a few limitations in my FrameMaker-to-DITA migration effort

Hi all,

I’ve been tasked with developing a migration path from FrameMaker to DITA for approximately 25k pages of documentation from 40ish books. I’m working on a perl script to convert FrameMaker-written XML to DITA.

I wanted to share two limitations I’ve run into. This is FYI in the spirit of information sharing; I have workarounds in place and I’m not requesting any action.

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Item 1: There are places where I need <foreign>, <unknown>, or <required-cleanup> elements to preserve external information for later review, but the OASIS content models do not allow them. Two real-world examples are:

allow <required-cleanup> in <uicontrol> (for unsupported nested styles that the author must review)

allow <foreign> in <cmdname> (for legacy links to external interactive help systems where the practitioner must develop new machinery later)

I incorrectly filed a DITA-OT issue for this (https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3167) but I’ve since learned that this mailing list is the proper audience. Though closed, more detail is contained there.

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Item 2: Some of our FrameMaker reference manuals have large numbers of appendixes, separated into categories using partitions. However, DITA bookmaps do not support <part> hierarchy in appendix backmatter:

bookmap =

element bookmap {

(booktitle | title)?,

bookmeta?,

frontmatter?,

chapter*,

part*,

(appendices? | appendix*),

backmatter?,

reltable*

}

element part {

topicmeta?,

}

Currently I delete all <part> elements that precede an appendix , but the product teams have expressed dissatisfaction with this.

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Chris Papademetrious

Tech Writer, Implementation Group

(610) 628-9718 home office

(570) 460-6078 cell

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