Re: DOCBOOK: looking for Framemaker -> SGML DocBook DTD (and DkBk -> Fmk) free tools

[Bjørn Remseth <rmz at dunk dot follo dot net>]

On Fri, Oct 15, 1999 at 09:10:11AM -0400, DuCharme, Robert wrote:
> To go from DocBook to FrameMaker, there's the (not cheap) special version of
> FrameMaker called FrameMaker+SGML comes with *some* built-in DocBook
> support. 

The support for DocBook in FrameMaker+SGML is really bad, it's only for an
outdated version (2.something).  What's there is pretty much useless for
DocBook 3.*. I tried (and a few FrameMaker experts from the Adobe's
Norwegian representatives helped me) to get a DocBook 3.1 document into
Framemaker, but it was very very hard, and eventually we gave up.

According to Adobe there are no plans for an upgrade. I checked this myself
about two months ago through the Norwegian dealer, who talked with someone
in a support center in Scotland who was supposed to have authorative
information on the subject.

This was sad, because our graphic designer is not at all comfortable with
programming languages, and our developers are better used elsewhere than
hacking stylesheets, so FrameMaker's somewhat wysiwyggified way of
generating (framemaker-specific) stylesheets would have been very useful for
us when preparing the printed paper version of our documentation.

							(Rmz)