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Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: FrameMaker 7.0
For those who were interested in using FrameMaker with DocBook XML, it looks like FrameMaker 7.0 will do that. I just received my copy of FrameMaker 7.0, which combines the standard FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML into a single product that also does XML. It comes with a DocBook XML 4.1.2 application, which means an EDD (Frame's version of a DTD), read/write rules for moving between XML and Frame's .fm file format, and a set of paragraph and inline formats. I was able to do File->Open on DocBook 4.1.2 XML documents, if they had the correct DocBook PUBLIC identifier in the DOCTYPE. The document becomes a Frame structured .fm file, which means you are working in a WYSIWYG formatted view. You can turn on the tag boundaries for editing elements, but be sure to turn them off before saving as PDF because they show up there. The only problem I've seen so far is that literallayout line breaks aren't always preserved. When you open a <book> document, Frame creates a standard Frame book file and divides the chapters into individual Frame documents. I think the formatting styles in the app need some work, but Adobe says that the app they provide is just a starting point for the user to improve upon. I can't comment on its behavior as an XML editor yet. I see a couple of oddities when I round-trip XML files through it, but that may just need some tweaking of the read/write rules. But at least FM7 loads DocBook XML 4.1.2, which is a big improvement over FM6+SGML. If nothing else, there is now a new hardcopy formatting engine for DocBook, if you can afford it. More importantly, if it works as advertised, it will open up DocBook authoring to a large class of users who prefer a word processing environment. -- Bob Stayton 400 Encinal Street Publications Architect Santa Cruz, CA 95060 Technical Publications voice: (831) 427-7796 Caldera International, Inc. fax: (831) 429-1887 email: bobs@caldera.com
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