Re: Frame XML to HTML Help via XSLT

[larry.kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

Rick Quatro wrote:

> I am doing some research for a client who is struggling the whole
> "single-source" idea. ....  What ends up happening is that the
> information goes back and forth between FrameMaker and RoboHelp during 
the
> life of the project. This doesn't work very well, even with MIF support 
in
> RoboHelp.
> 
> I have an idea, but would like some opinions on real-world feasibility. 
My
> thought is for them to use structured FrameMaker 7 to produce content. 
Then
> they would export XML and transform it using XSLT to HTML. The HTML 
would
> have to be in a format that RoboHelp could use. I don't know much about
> RoboHelp, so I don't know how practical this is. ...

I've successfully transformed structured FM+SGML documents to HTML
using a similar path, Save as XML -> cleanup script -> XSLT -> HTML.
That was Frame 6, we're about to order Frame 7.

The cleanup script does nit-picky things like removing "on page 3-42"
from cross-references and fixes the extensions (Save As XML, as you
may know, gives each XML file extensions like ".e00" ".e01" and so
forth.)  I've since learned that it might be possible to do everything
inside the stylesheet except rename the extensions, but I haven't tried
it yet.

WWP gave birth to the XSLT stylesheet in brief experiments with WWP.
I was somewhat less than thrilled with the way WWP wanted to format
everything, so I completely rewrote the XSLT in a few non-busy
afternoons, saving only the structure. Then I scrapped the CSS it
generated, replaced it with one I wrote from scratch, and never
used WWP again. :-) It was my first serious attempt at using XSLT,
and in the end I was surprised at how well it worked. 


For your project, I guess everything hinges on the phrase "in a
format that RoboHelp could use." My stylesheet generated very clean
HTML, I'm horribly picky about that, although I never tried to
validate it.  The thing you probably need to worry about most are
the sequence & ID tags that HTML Help requires[1], and those could
be embedded in the (Frame) document structure as attributes or empty
tags or perhaps derived from the structure itself. But once you get
that right, you should have a pretty smooth (one-way) workflow:
author everything in Frame, publish to PDF or HTML Help as necessary.
I suspect you can apply some of your FrameScript wizardry to the
publishing end of things to make things easier on your client.


[1] I *assume* HTML Help requires them. I've never dealt with it
myself, although I've worked with the older WinHelp. 

--
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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