RE: [docbook-apps] Cross-references through Framemaker?

[Jeff Beal <jeff dot beal at ansys dot com>]

Some of the answers to your questions here depend on what you mean by
'document'.  For example, we create 25 user manuals for our main product
from our XML source.  In a generic sence, each of these books is a separate
document.  In the XML sense, however, these books are considered a single
document because we enclose all 25 books in a <set/> element using entity
references.  

The reason this is important is that the <xref/> and <link/> elements can
only be used to create cross-references within the same XML document.  The
<olink/> element is what is used to link from one XML document to the other.
So, in answer to your question of whether xrefs and links are the usual way
of creating cross-references outside the source file, it depends on the XML
tree.  If you have a single XML tree split across multiple documents, as we
do, then xref and link is the much simpler way to go (this is what we do).
If, on the other hand, you have several separate XML trees, each contained
in its own file, then you have to use <olink/>.  (This entire discussion
becomes more than a little bit fuzzier when you throw XInclude into the mix,
but I don't believe that Framemaker supports XInclude -- I could be
completely wrong on that, though.)

Jeff Beal

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carl Anderson [mailto:cea@ncipher.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 11:39 AM
> To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [docbook-apps] Cross-references through Framemaker?
> 
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been lurking quite a while and reading, but now find I 
> need to post a 
> question ....
> 
> My docs team writes manuals in XML using docbook, and we pour 
> this through 
> FrameMaker 7 to produce PDFs using Frame's template/EDD 
> configuration.  This set-up allowed us to migrate easily from an 
> all-FrameMaker environment to one in which we can work with 
> DocBook XML 
> (much better for us) while being able to take advantage of 
> Framemaker's 
> strengths in producing good-looking PDFs that looked like the PDFs we 
> produced from our earlier all-Framemaker set-up.
> 
> However, we've had some difficulty getting things to behave 
> the way we'd 
> like, and we're not always sure where we're running into 
> limitations on 
> what Frame can do with XML (of which, of course, there are a 
> number!), 
> where we're screwing up, or some combination of these 
> problems :)  One of 
> our particular difficulties is trying to get cross-references 
> working in 
> our output PDFs.
> 
> What we we think we need is a tranformation that converts 
> olinks (with a 
> targetdocent specified) into cross-references that link to the target 
> entity.  We've played with this a bit, but without much 
> success so far. It 
> would be useful to know if there's a tried-and-tested way of 
> doing this 
> before we spend a lot of time barking up the wrong tree.  
> Alternatively, it 
> would be useful to know if xrefs to linkends outside the 
> source file are 
> the usual way to do cross-references.  Do anyone have any 
> experience with 
> this sort of thing?
> 
> Cheers,
> Carl
> 
> 
> --
> Carl E. Anderson  mailto:cea@ncipher.com  http://www.ncipher.com/
> nCipher Corporation Ltd.   +44 1223 723690   Fax: +44 1223 723601 
> 
> 
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