Formatting with FrameMaker + SGML's EDD

Daniel K. Schneider, TECFA, University of Geneva

http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/xml/frame-sgml/

Version 0.5 - may 2001

Version 0.3 first useful draft. Version 0.4: added pointer to sdocbook. Version 0.5 said something about attributes

Thanx to Jan den Hartog ( objective i), Kevin Lossner (Easy Software AG), Marcus Carr (Allette Systems) , Ceryle Gaehl (Australian Medicines Handbook) for helpful comments.

Summary

This is a very short introduction to formatting with Framemaker + SGML's EDD. I use version 6 for Solaris and Windows. You also must read the developer's manual (in particular chapters 7, parts of 8, 9 ) which you can find as a 550 page PDF file in some directory in your distribution. In addition, is strongly suggested that you download all the files from http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/xml/frame-sgml/ including the ones in the Stepbystep and sdocbook directories and that you look at the source code.

The best example I have at the date of this writing (check yourself) is an incomplete EDD for Norman Walsh's Simplified Docbook XML DTD: http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/xml/frame-sgml/sdocbook/

This is a first rough draft (including the English). I don't know when I will have time to improve it.

Introduction

Prerequisites

Major Steps

Step 1: Try to grasp the logic of EDD formatting

Step 2: Understand the anatomy of a simple EDD rule

Step 3: Identify the elements that need formatting

Step 4: Create EDD and template files

Step 5: Create a few basic standard Frame paragraphs

Step 6: Define rules for standard paragraphs

Step 7: Simple text range elements

Step 8: Simple title rules

Step 9: Special Elements

Step 10: Printing Attributes and attributes for printing

Step 11: Exporting to XML

Step 12: Do some server-side stuff with it

Open questions