🚀 go-pugleaf

Alex,

Using the Structure Current Document sounds quite appropriate for your process. If the resulting formatting is correct, you may not need an EDD. If any elements have context-sensitive formatting, though, you probably will at some point.

Read/write rules and defining a structured application are not relevant until you have structured your document and are ready to save it as XML. There is no default file of read/write rules. Rather, when you save your structured document as XML, FrameMaker has a default representation for every construct. If the default is not acceptable, you can request several common variants of this default behavior with read/write rules. Read/write rules can be entered in text files or in FrameMaker files. You create the file yourself, and then you define an application to use it. See the Structure Application Developer Guide for more information.

By the way, read/write rules are not a general-purpose programming language. In situations that require more complex differences between FrameMaker's default XML representation and the element structure within FrameMaker, you can use the FDK to write a plug-in to move between the two representations. You may also be able to use XSLT to transform one to the other. Both techniques let you use the default behavior as modified by read/write rules as much as necessary, so you need write code only for the exceptional situations.

Also, the XML structure you are using, representing an index marker with an element that has subelements for each level of entry and subentry is not uncommon. As long as you don't have subentries, you can derive both elements through the conversion table. If you do want subentries, though, you'll need to use a different structure in FrameMaker and in XML. In FrameMaker, you'll need to retain all levels in one marker, retaining FrameMaker's index marker syntax so that FrameMaker can build an index. In XML, though, you'll probably need separate elements for each level. In this case, you'll need to use the FDK or XSLT. For example, suppose you are writing a cookbook and want to divide the index entries for "chocolate" into several subcategories. You might have an index marker with the text "chocolate:cake" that you want to represent in XML as

<index>
<indexPrimaryEntry>chocolate</indexPrimaryEntry>
<indexSecondaryEntry>cake</indexSecondaryEntry>
</index>

Since read/write rules do not provide a way to generate this structure, you'll need to usesomething else.



--Lynne