Re: FrameMaker files to UNIX man pages

[larry.kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

Larry Kovner wrote:

> I have a client that wants me to convert FrameMaker files to UNIX man
> pages.  I need to take two chapters from a command line reference guide 
I
> wrote and convert them.

I don't have anything I can pull out of my back pocket, but
here are some suggestions for going about it....

If the current Frame document is structured (SGML),
it should be fairly easy -- I remember reading that
DocBook was originally designed to convert man pages
to SGML. If you're really lucky, and you're using a
DocBook-based EDD already, I'm pretty sure there are
stylesheets out there that will do the hard work for
you.

If the document isn't structured, you could use one of
the scripting tools (FrameScript, AppleScript) to
insert troff tags based on the paragraph & character
styles, then save the file as text. Alternatively, you
could key on words like "Syntax" and use Find/Replace
to insert tags. 

I once converted a long chapter of CLI commands to
HTML by structuring it, saving to SGML, then running
it through a TCL script. That was when I used Frame
5.1. I could have converted to man pages the same way
if necessary.

One more possibility -- if you have Frame 6 and a
bit of patience, you can save to XML (this works for
unstructured files as well). You end up with tag soup,
but that's not critical for this application. Then you
can write an XSLT stylesheet to transform it to man.
In your situation, that's probably what I'd do.

Whatever you do, you'll lose any text or paragraph
overrides. Just something to keep in mind.


> I'd like to preserve the format so I don't have
> to reformat the text files.

Well, if this is a one-shot deal, or your document is
laden with overrides, you might actually be better off
saving your chapters as text & inserting tags with a
text editor. It's the repetitive stuff that makes writing
scripts or transforms worth the effort.

Also, keep in mind that troff -man was one of the first
single-sourcing formats around (and one of the most
successful, at least in terms of longevity and number
of documents using it). I know of at least one browser
on Linux (Konqueror) that can display man pages and
add some basic hyperlinking. But man pages are really
meant for short documents; they get unwieldy for on-
screen viewing when you go longer than roughly two
printed pages. --The point being, any fancy formatting
is going to get clobbered in some common situations
like typing "man foo" in an xterm.

Finally, I've been told that Sun's man pages are some
of the best examples out there. If you can, you may
want to study them to get a few ideas about what to
leave in & what to leave out.

--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
    -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc



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