Preserve/Don't Preserve FM styles, mapping & stylesheets

[bernie]

The Madcap docs and Import forum topics offer advice on aspects of these issues, but I am still boggled wrt making informed choices for our workflows. Can anyone offer or point to a comprehensive treatment of the interrelationships/effects/pro's--con's of the following:

• Preserve FM styles vs Don't Preserve FM styles + using/not using the Conversion Styles button
• The various tag variants Flare presents, and why you would choose one vs another, e.g.:
  • h1
  • h1.{FrameMaker Style}
  • p.h1
  • not manually mapping at all
• Specifying vs NOT specifying an existing stylesheet
  • If you reference an existing stylesheet, what effect does that have/not have on the FM and Flare tags presented in the mapping dialog?
  • What if there are styles in your imported FM files that are not specified in the referenced stylesheet; are the styles from both merged in the list presented in the mapping dialog?
  • If you reference an existing stylesheet, then make changes to tag attributes, under what conditions are those changes written or NOT written to the referenced stylesheet (or to a stylesheet somewhere else)?

One of our groups' workflow will retain FM as the authoring environment, and other groups plan to convert once then author in Flare ever after, so I need to figure out the optimal conversion options for both. Our FM template is pretty clean and well-specified. Flare counterparts to most, but probably not all, of our FM tags will be needed in the online Help.

Thanks for any attempts to address this.
- Bernie Meyer, Concept Publications, Inc.

[Beryl]

I am sure that others will be able to provide a more extensive response for you, but I am going through the same process (and boggling) in my conversion from FM to Flare.

Choosing between h1 h1.{FrameMaker style} and p.h1.

I wouldn't use the p.h1. One of the advantages of going to CSS is the ability to chunk and subordinate information. Choosing p.h1 causes you to lose the information that is specified in a heading by making it a paragraph.

My project has three variants of the second level (h2) heading (the variants are used to force or suppress a new page break). Because I am delivering in PDF as well as context-sensitive help, I want to preserve this paging. To be consistant in my style structure, I use the h1.{FrameMaker} version.

Specifying vs NOT specifying an existing stylesheet

One of the best pieces of advice I was given in the conversion process was to translate one or two chapters at first, then refine my style sheet. Once I had the topics looking more or less correctly, I translated the entire document, specifying the stylesheets I had created and modified.

Translation from another tool is a bit messy; but the longer I work with the process, the more I appreciate the tools.

-Beryl Gray

[GregStenhouse]

If you are creating online help, and will be reusing Flare templates across multiple projects, I would recommend "Don't Preserve FM styles", and define and link to your own stylesheet (and map those styles manually). The main reason: it gives you much more control and consistency each time you import. The opposite approach (preserving FrameMaker styles and/or having Flare create a stylesheet for you) might be a good option if you are importing purely for a one-off print output and don't care so much about ongoing maintenance (it may appear similar to what is shown in Frame, but it is also likely to produce a long list of styles with unpredictable names and css properties).

When mapping, definitely use H1, H2, H3 etc (this means the correct text will be displayed for mini-TOCs, breadcrumbs etc if you decide to use those down the track). I also found it useful to create a p.display_none style (which had the Display:None CSS property) so I could choose to hide certain styles if needed.

Some of your questions:

If you reference an existing stylesheet, what effect does that have/not have on the FM and Flare tags presented in the mapping dialog?

Your FrameMaker styles appear with your linked stylesheet styles, and you can map the two.

What if there are styles in your imported FM files that are not specified in the referenced stylesheet; are the styles from both merged in the list presented in the mapping dialog?

You have the option of mapping to Flare styles like H1.(FrameMaker Style), p.(FrameMaker Style). That will append the FrameMaker style name to H1. or p. (e.g. if you have a style such as "Bulleted" in Frame and you map to p.(FrameMaker) Style it will map to p.Bulleted even if that doesn't exist in your stylesheet). You can then go into your stylesheet after the import and create an entry for p.Bulleted. Personally I wouldn't do it that way, if I found a style that needed to be mapped and wasn't in the linked stylesheet yet, I would back out of the import, edit the stylesheet and import again.

If you reference an existing stylesheet, then make changes to tag attributes, under what conditions are those changes written or NOT written to the referenced stylesheet (or to a stylesheet somewhere else)

You can reference a stylesheet already in your \Content\Resources\Stylesheets folder (we do this, as the css is already there from a project template), or you can reference a stylesheet somewhere else (e.g. a network location). If you do that, then it will make a copy of the stylesheet in your \Content\Resources\Stylesheets folder. In either case, if you change tags after the import then you are making changes to a local stylesheet specific to the current project (not a referenced stylesheet somewhere else).

Hope this helps
Cheers
Greg