Re: DITA: going from FrameMaker to oXygen

[Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Hi Rebecca,

I'm interested in the reasons you or your department decided to change 
from Framemaker to Oxygen. Just curious.

I've used both Framemaker and Oxygen with DITA and I personally prefer 
Oxygen, but I'm sure some people prefer the way Framemaker does things. 
As for converting the DITA files from Framemaker, it should work pretty 
well if you're using XML as the source format and not binary Framemaker 
files. I assume you're not using a DITA CCMS like Ixiasoft, easyDITA, etc.

For doing things like change bars in the editor, Fm probably uses XML 
"processing instructions" (PIs) to accomplish the change bars. These 
will be proprietary to Fm since they are not part of the DITA standard. 
But Oxygen also uses their own PIs to make change bars, and there is 
probably a way to write a conversion script to change from Fm PIs to 
Oxygen PIs. The same is probably true of Fm cross references and other 
stuff.

One major difference between Fm and Oxygen is ease of customized PDF 
output. It's probably a lot easier to make a nice-looking PDF in Fm than 
in Oxygen. Oxygen's PDF output uses the DITA Open Toolkit and you must 
deal with the OT to change the way your PDF looks. If you have 
customized your PDF output in Fm, it will not help you in Oxygen, you 
will have to start over.

Does your department use a centralized server to publish PDFs? (As 
opposed to each writer generating their own PDFs.) If you do, you are 
probably using Framemaker Server, which costs about 9000 USD last I 
checked. No need for extra software or fees if you're using the DITA OT 
on a server.

Making HTML-based output (like a webhelp system, or plain HTML files, 
etc) will be different with Oxygen also (DITA OT again). There are 
various ways to do HTML-based output from Fm, so it's hard to say what 
you will run into.

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://www.markgiffin.com/

On 09-Dec-18 6:44 PM, Rebecca Officer wrote: