Re: FM and Revision Control Systems

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Unless I'm missing something, It seems much easier to do it right and use 
either FM+SGML 6.0 or FM7 to create structured docs and save them out as 
SGML or XML for storage in the versioning system. That drastically reduces 
file sizes, and the versioning system (as it should) is only concerned with 
managing content, not formatting information. Then, when you check out a 
version, you import the SGML or XML into FM+SGML or FM7, and the EDD 
restores all the formatting information.

The hitch, however is FM+SGML's non-support of SUBDOCS, and its inability 
to export individual text insets as external SGML text entities. Thus, if 
you maintain and update those text insets in FrameMaker, you cannot export 
each new version of a text inset as an external SGML text entity that is 
placed under separate version control. Consequently, when you export an FM 
document file containing text insets that were imported by reference, 
FM+SGML cannot replace the text insets with the proper entity references to 
the applicable external SGML text entities, whose versioning must be 
maintained separately.

There is no evidence that these deficiencies have been fixed in FM7, and if 
that is the case, users of FM7 who make extensive use of text insets will 
be unable to take advantage of the capability to maintain version control 
using the SGML or XML document instances and external SGML text entities 
instead of FrameMaker documents.
At 09:20 AM 5/1/02 -0700, dbneeley@earthlink.net wrote:
>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!).

====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
177 Riverside Ave., STE F, #1151, Newport Beach, CA 92663
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