Re: Replacement for DOS Ventura Publisher for publishing book

[sburnf -at- au1 -dot- ibm -dot- com]

Hi Phoebe -

Has your colleague looked into Adobe FrameMaker and its Maker Markup
Language feature? MML is FrameMaker's own tagged ASCII format. Roughly
speaking, you set up the templates in FrameMaker, create an empty book
with placeholders for the TOC, chapters and Index, write the ASCII file
from the database using tags to represent paragraph and character styles
and index markers, then import the file to your book.

I'm sure MML and Frame can handle requirements 1, 2, 3 and 5.

I think 4 isn't a problem but I don't know enough about non-Latin
languages and Unicode to be certain.

As for 6, all the templates and mappings can be set up in advance. With
standard FrameMaker on Windows, doing the import, generating the index and
TOC and producing the print or PDF output are done through the GUI and
would take a few minutes. (I'm assuming the process has been well tested
in advance and they're happy with the mappings and formatting.)

FrameMaker on UNIX includes a set of batch processing commands called
fmbatch. With fmbatch all the GUI steps in the previous paragraph can be
automated. FrameMaker on Windows doesn't include fmbatch but there are
plug-ins that do the same:

- DZbatcher, a free Windows version of fmbatch:
   http://www.miramo.com/dzbatcher2.html
- DoBatch, a free plugin somewhat similar to DZbatcher:
   http://www.telecable.es/personales/cud/homepgs/plugins.htm
- FrameScript, a general scripting language for FM (not free):
   http://www.framescript.com/default.htm

The MML Reference comes with FrameMaker or is available online at:
http://partners.adobe.cm/public/developer/en/framemaker/MML_Reference.pdf

If MML doesn't meet your colleague's needs, there are some smart folks who
specialise in publishing DB=>Frame on the Free Framers list:
http://www.freeframers.org/

Regards

Stuart Burnfield
Gentoo Communications
mailto: slb at westnet dot com dot hey you

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