Re: Frame&SGML: looking for opinions of current users
Consider this a vast improvement over 6.0 and earlier.
Not for everyday use. Re-starting the same program and switching between two products have about an equal nuisance value.
> Also, since
much of the structure functionality is implemented via dlls (Win), clients (Unix), or plugins (Mac), the only way to load those things is at startup - so to load the capability into the product you need to restart.
Yes - I acknowledged that.However, there are ways around that: loading everything each time (and accepting a longer startup time) and giving an option of which interface to use during startup are the most obvious ones.
That said, I want to point out that the structure/SGML/XML capability is a strict superset of the unstructured product. What that means is, you have no *need* to switch to the unstructured mode - ever. If you want to edit an unstructured document, just edit an unstructured document. (Note that opening a structured doc in unstructured Maker will strip the structure data out of it on SAVE.)
That's exactly why you'd want to switch - to control the output. If you work for one company, that might not matter, but if you're a contractor, it can.
Since DocBook is probably the most thorough and most complete DTD in use, virtually nobody has an application that makes use of the entire DTD.
No, but I can dream, can't I?
> So it is with DocBook - a *complete*
implementation of DocBook for FrameMaker would be prohibitively expensive, and it would also be prohibitively cumbersome for the user - or so the theory goes.
You're right.But even a subset would be a welcome feature.
Also, I'm not sure of this, but DocBook may utilize some aspects of SGML that Maker can't support... But we're talking about pretty esoteric stuff here.
What did you have in mind? I'm not intimately familiar with DocBook, but I can't think of anything off-hand (which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, of course).The problem with DocBook is more its size than anything else.
Anyway, Maker 7 ships with starter kits for DocBook - SGML and XML flavors. You can establish structure applications for them and make something reasonable happen. Check out the docs to see what is supported.
Unless I missed something, there's nothing that can't be pulled off the web.
And, yes, you can certainly set up FrameMaker 7.0 to work with DocBook, as I mentioned. But that's not the point. The point is that,in many ways, DocBook is to markup languages what .doc format is to standard word processing. You'd think that interface support for DocBook would be a basic feature of an ML GUI.
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