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Re: Flare or Frame as an intermediary for migrating to DITA?
Subject:Re: Flare or Frame as an intermediary for migrating to DITA? From:Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 17 Oct 2014 02:42:39 -0700
Robert says:
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I think the basic problem with trying to automate this is that each of
your legacy tags / paragraph and character styles will probably map to
various DITA tags depending on the context, and some DITA tags will be
mapped from more than one legacy tag.
For example, with legacy HTML source, how would you map <p>? With
FrameMaker source, how would you map Body?
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This is very true at a higher level in DITA. Do you break your docs into separate topics per heading level? How do you identefy whether they're task, concept, reference, etc? One good trick in Maker is to expand your pgf format catalog to include different types of headings for the different types of topics, and then manually make those decisions before converting. But I believe that below the topic wrapping level there shouldn't be too much ambiguity. How do you map a <p>? As a <p>. Same thing with Body in Maker. The purpose of a <p> is the same in all the topic types as far as I know. And that should translate to most if not all other contained elements. The only differences should be what's allowed to be contained in a given topic type or its child elements, and how to format it.
That said, you might have to make lower level decisions. For example, you might have a bullet list for a list of parameters. Instead of mapping that to a <ul> you probably want to map it to a parml. Again, you can preset this in Maker by creative use of the pgf catalog.
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