Programmatically convert DITA to FrameMaker

Question

Is there a toolkit available (paid or otherwise) to help with programmatically converting a DITA document to a FrameMaker one?

I'm attempting to make an application that converts to multiple formats from DITA. I know I can use the DITA Open Toolkit for most of my needs, but I need to be able to create a native FrameMaker document as well.

Programing language doesn't matter, altho I prefer Java as my application will be web based.

Answer 1

Arbortext import-export is industrial strength and very flexible. You could also try MIFtoGo. Conversion is tricky because source documents are rarely consistent. Conversion without cleanup before and after is next to impossible.

Answer 2

The disclaimer is that if you're converting a lot of documents you'll be better off with a supported well-integrated solution that fully uses FrameMaker's DITA support. If you're looking to do it on the cheap though (and who isn't) you can do this conversion by using straight XSLT and framemaker templates.

First create the framemaker template to handle the appearance of the document, then use XSLT to map your DITA content to the content tags you've used in Framemaker.

You can use the free SAXON xslt interpretor to do the actual conversion.

Here is some of adobe's reference material on authoring new DITA documents: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FrameMaker/8.0/05h/dita.html

Info on Framemakers's native XML support is here: http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/pdfs/xml_fm7.pdf

The framemaker manuals also cover the subject quite extensively. Hope that helps

Answer 3

Bryan, after a decade's experience converting Frame, Word, Interleaf, etc to XML, I'll tell you that Adobe doesn't have it fully covered. The DITA support in FrameMaker works best if you also have the Leximation plug-in or know how to program the Adobe proprietary EDD. You can't do DITA specialization without programming the EDD in FrameMaker.

Answer 4

DITA-FMx is what you need:

http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/

Using DITA-FMx, you generate a FrameMaker book from your ditamap (and then save the FM book as PDF).

There is a movie on YouTube that shows you how the process goes. Just search for "PDF Publishing with DITA-FMx 1.1" (Stack Overflow does not allow me to post a second URL here yet)

If you like to see an example, just send me a small sample of a ditamap and I'll generate a FrameMaker book for you.

Answer 5

FrameMaker has excellent support for DITA. You can open DITA topics, and save them (if you wish) as .fm files. You could also open DITAMAPS, and save them as FrameMaker book files, or as composite (monolithic) .fm files. There is no need to write a parser.

PS: I am talking about FM 12.

Answer 6

Indeed FM supports loading DITA files (I tried FM10 and newer) but to automate conversion to .FM format you either use the internal scripting mechanism which is still some manual work. I have found an existing free utility that can do most basic operations like opening a file, 'saving as' another format and closing it. tool name is DZBatcher

Example DZbatcher batch file:

Open "c:\My Dita Files\Doc1.dita"
SaveAs -d "c:\My FM Files\Doc1.fm"
Close "c:\My FM Files\Doc1.fm"
Open "c:\My Dita Files\Doc2.dita"
SaveAs -d "c:\My FM Files\Doc2.fm"
Close "c:\My FM Files\Doc2.fm"
Exit

Adobe has a framework called RoboHelp which is probably the infrastructure for this, but I didn't dig deeper as this utility did the job perfectly.

In my SW flow, I created this batch file using a python script that scan all the docs in an input directory and added 3 lines per file as seen above.

I used FM2015 for this task.