Core Dump

Blast/Radius seem to be moving fairly aggressively to support DITA in their XMetal authoring tool. Last week, I participated in a webinar in which they demonstrated authoring in DITA, but with an interesting twist. They took an unstructured FrameMaker document, converted it to a structured FrameMaker document, then imported it into XMetal, and then exported it back into FrameMaker to produce a nicely formatted, printable document which was fully structured and maintained all of the IDs and other structured information that they'd added in XMetal.

The twist was a new plug-in for FrameMaker, developed by Mekon, which will become part of the DITA Open Toolkit early next year. The plug-in will allow you to take DITA content from Xmetal and export it to FrameMaker to get a document that's perfectly formatted for print, and maintains all of FrameMaker's indexing and conditional text functionality. (Yes, I know you can output PDF from XML via XSL-FO, but FrameMaker has much better output for print).

According to an email posted by Mark Poston of Mekon to the DITA-users mailing list (quoted with permission)

The adapter that we are working on provides a direct import of XML into
FrameMaker. This means that the id/idref mechanism for cross referencing
is used (not paragraph styles as required in unstructured FM). In
addition, we are using FM hyperlinks to support other forms of cross
referencing.

The backward compatibility with existing FrameMaker templates is an
important feature. The Element Definition Documents (EDD) that will be
provided with the toolkit will be based on referencing to styles in a
template. At its simplest, this will allow users to modify to their own
needs in two ways:

Firstly, they could simply rename their existing styles to match those
in the supplied template.

Secondly, users who have already got experience with the development of
EDDs will be able to make direct changes to this and continue to use the
styles they have. For those with less experience, the EDD will fairly
easily to follow "by example".

The context rules within the EDD are class-based. This means that users
who have adopted a particular specialisation can easily build support into the EDD for them.

I have to say that this looked pretty impressive. You could have all of the benefits of authoring in a full XML/DITA environment and still get production quality printed output from FrameMaker.