Re: FM and Revision Control Systems

[dbneeley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Eric,

I have another suggestion. Rather than going to the incredible amount of work that the scripting and such that your suggeestion would entail, why not simply employ some simple XML editor capable of easily inserting perhaps ten or twenty XML tags. Then, use Frame 7 to do the formatting (or perhaps InDesign, which I'm very interested in looking at for this purpose!).

You wouldn't have to take out the formatting or use such an expensive solution for all your writers, yet you'd have the formatting power for the finished output!

I understand the next version of Lyx (www.lyx.org), for example, will output to DocBook format...and, it's a free tool to boot. Surely there are other XML editors with many more to come that could be used for this?

The author would still have full power to determine logical structure without being concerned in advance with character or other stylistic formats...until time to assemble the output document!

Versioning and knowledge management software is increasingly being XML oriented, after all.

The result may well be faster, better, and cheaper!

Regards,

David


On Wed, 1 May 2002 11:55:10 -0400 eric.dunn@ca.transport.bombardier.com wrote:

Following Chris' suggestion/musings about the effect of UIDs on MIF files stored
in versioning systems, the following idea struck me.

Why not script FM to save as MIF and then strip the MIF of ALL MIF code that is
not absolutely necessary (PERL or other tool). This would remove some of the
conflicts and difficulties identifying changed content and it would have the
advantage of greatly reducing the amount of data stored by the versioning
system.

The versioning system could also control template use. If you strip the MIF of
all catalogues and formatting information this information would be replaced by
the contents of the template used when opeinthe MIF file. With appropriate
programming it should be possible to link MIF files in the versioning system
with FM template files that could alos be checked into the system.

Another thought:
As long as you're scripting and manipulating the FM file and resultant MIF, some
standards enforcement could be accomplished at the same time. For example,
ensuring charater formats are used instead of manual overrides.

Eric L. Dunn



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