MadCap to DITA conversion

[pmtoth]

We have an ongoing project where we author in unstructured FrameMaker and import the files into MadCap Flare to get the WebHelp. It is a one-way workflow that works nicely. We have invested quite a bit of time to get the CCS that formats the content in the help system.

Now, we have a new project using the same content. We want to convert the content in unstructured FrameMaker to DITA. We want to author and maintain the content in DITA and output it in three transforms: PDF, WebHelp, and MS Word. We want to stay in DITA and use Flare as a publishing engine becaue we have to reuse content at very granular level that Flare cannot support.

We were wondering if it is worth it to leverage the work we have been doing in MadCap Flare to help with both the DITA conversion and the three transforms.
1) How might we approach the DITA conversion? We have tried a test of one chapter and we got nice clean DITA with very little effort. We are worried though about how the files will be organized when Flare does the conversion. It would be nice if we could get the topic files into folders for Reference, Concept, Task, and Topic and the ditamaps into a folder called ditamaps without having to manually move the files and relink the ditamaps.
2) When we have DITA as input to Flare, how would we approach getting the transforms, in particular the PDF transform? Is there a way to use some of the CCS work we have already done?
3) Once we have converted content in DITA and the transforms, is there a way to automate building the outputs in Flare?

Paula Toth
aka The Single Sorceress

Office: (925) 956-4215
E-Mail: Paula@techprose.com

Website: http://www.techprose.com


Specialists in corporate communication, documentation, training, content management, project and change management.

[GregStenhouse]

Hopefully I've understood your workflow, you will import from FrameMaker to Flare, then export to DITA (one way). And then author and maintain content in DITA, import back to Flare (multiple times), then use Flare to generate PDF, webhelp, and other targets?
We've used Flare and DITA in a similar way (import from Frame to Flare, and then export to DITA), so hopefully I can help with some of your questions.

1) Flare will maintain the folder structure when exporting, so if you have your Content folder organised into Concepts/Tasks etc then Flare will respect that when exporting. Your ditiamp file will always be in the parent folder though. I don't think there's anyway to change this. A couple of issues we had when exporting to DITA, notes cannot be separated into the note types that DITA typically requires (e.g. note type="tip" etc). And DITA does not support autonumbers (so if you are importing from FrameMaker you need to manually convert all lists into simple HTML lists). DITA is also a bit picky about paragraphs in lists and sublists, there is a right and wrong way to do this in Flare.
2) Are you creating PDFs using Flare or the DITA open toolkit? If the former then there are no transforms, you just set up your page layouts, print CSS and PDF target as normal. If you are using the open toolkit to create PDF, then it does not use CSS - you will be modifying XSL stylesheets to get the output (via XSL-FO) you need. There is no simple way to re-use any previous styles or layouts from Flare, expect to spend several weeks getting the PDF looking anything like what you had from FrameMaker or Flare.
3) Once you have the content in Flare you can use either the old way (command line using madbuild) or using batch targets (v6).

Hope this helps, let me know if want any more info.
Cheers
Greg