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Kevin Ryan wrote:
> [Sorry if this is a duplicate for anyone. I'm resending this as text because my first transmission received an error concerning my mail format.]
>
> Hi,
>
> I have what is probably an elementary question about converting FrameMaker 7.0 to HTML---something I'm unfamiliar with. Many of my company's program screens contain a link to their own simple context-specific help page written in HTML. This page does not require dynamic content, Help indexing, or Help TOC. It is just simple HTML conforming to our company's own CSS style sheets for formatting.
>
> Is there such thing as a "quick and simple" method to convert FM content directly to HTML (or "Save As HTML") and still be able to apply our own CSS style sheets to the output? We have the WW Publisher Standard edition that came with our FM 7.0, but its documentation suggests I'm out of luck if I don't want to use the program's supplied style sheets. And FrameMaker's "save as" function seems to impose an FM-created style sheet of its own.
>
> Currently we use a roundabout manual procedure in which one department pastes FM content into Word, reformats in Word, and hands the Word file to another department where it is pasted into Dreamweaver and manually tweaked to the desired HTML.
>
> I'm looking over the sales lit on Robohelp and WW Pro ePublisher, but these seem to be overkill for my needs (especially Robohelp, which Adobe has apparently gone to great lengths to integrate only with TC Suite package).
>
> Any comments would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> Kevin Ryan
>
> Technical Writer
> Systems & Software, Inc.
> Williston
>
The typical conversions of Word or FrameMaker to HTML employ internal,
inline CSS being applied to nearly (if not all) element, resulting in
tremendous code bloat. However, I have easily transformed such Word- or
FrameMaker-converted HTML code into XHTML with compact external CSS,
with the use of a simple (X)HTML editor and a fair knowledge of CSS.
The free CoffeeCup HTML editor (or its $49 cousin) or the free W3C Amaya
HTML editor, among many others, can easily turn all that bloated code
into something quite manageable. CoffeeCup also has PHP capability, when
used with something like the free XAMPP 1.1.7 Apache 2.2/PHP 5.2.9
server on any simple PC (various platforms) can turn out decent XHTML/PHP.
Gary
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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