🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Shelley,

In my dealings with FM/XML, I use XML files like FM documents, authoring and saving them like FM binary files, checking in/out of source control individually, etc. These files are always intended to be chapters of some publication down the road, so the FM book concept is still an important part of being able to effectively publish. The problem with this, though, is that FM does not handle non-FM files in a book very well. You can get some things to work such as chapter and page numbering, but it is clunky and time-consuming every time you want to do it. So, when I need to publish, I have an API client which basically converts the XML files to FM to make a "throwaway" book, used just for making a PDF or whatever.

The process of converting an XML-file book to FM files is fairly straight-forward if you work with the API or FrameScript. It really only takes a couple of steps per file:

- Save as FM binary
- Adjust all cross-reference file targets, replacing the *.xml extension with *.fm

Note that this workflow assumes that the "book" concept is only useful to you in FrameMaker... if you need the higher-level book container in XML, you'd need to do something a little different.

This is certainly a home-made type of workflow and I don't know that it would be useful to you or not. I just brought it up because I've come to work this way due to dissatisfaction with FM books and XML. I saw on the Yahoo forum that you got some good advice, hopefully somewhere between here and there you can get something working.

Russ