Hi John Nadine has already given you a good description of how to proceed. This is how you could generate a FrameMaker book from a ditamap with DITA-FMx:
1. Create your DITA topics. 2. Create a bookmap, in which each chapter is a ditamap. The bookmap also contains <bookmeta>, which contains information which will be converted to Fm variables. 3. Create a ditaval file, for example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <val> <prop att="platform" val="pdf" action="exclude" /> <prop att="platform" val="help" action="include" /> <prop att="platform" val="chm" action="exclude" /> <prop att="platform" val="mac" action="include" /> <prop att="product" val="productA" action="include" /> <prop att="product" val="productB" action="exclude" /> <prop att="audience" val="novice_user" action="include" /> <prop att="audience" val="expert" action="exclude" /> <prop att="otherprops" val="snow" action="exclude" /> <prop img="_graphics/warning.png" alt="Warning!" att="rev" val="2.0" action="flag" /> </val> 4. Check the following folders: - C:\Program Files\Adobe\AdobeFrameMaker11\Structure\xml\DITA-FMx_1.1\Book\component-templates. Here, you will find DITA-FMx "component templates", which you can use to generate the Fm book from the bookmap. - C:\Program Files\Adobe\AdobeFrameMaker11\DITA-FMx. Here, you will find the ditafmx-bookbuild.ini file. 5. Copy the "component-templates" folder and the ditafmx-bookbuild.ini file to a new "output" folder, for example a subfolder of your "project folder", i.e. the folder in which you have your DITA files, for example: "my_project_folder" > "output" > ditafmx-bookbuild.ini > "component-templates" 6. Open the ditafmx-bookbuild.ini file and check the "BookTemplatesDir=". This refers to the folder where the "component templates" are. 7. Choose DITA-FMx > Generate Book From Map. 8. Select the bookmap and specify the output folder and enter a name for your Fm book. <stepresult>DITA-FMx will generate an Fm book, using the component templates. Now that you have an Fm book with some contents, you can customize it. This is how I do it: 1. Open my "legacy" unstructured Fm files. 2. Import the formats from my "legacy" unstructured Fm files into my generated Fm book. 3. Customize the formatting of the styles in the generated Fm files. The "Global Update Options" in the Paragraph and Character Designers can help here. TIP: Do not rename the formats which come from the component templates, for example title.0, title.1, step.continue etc. because these are also used in the EDD, for example: Element (Container): cmd > If context is: step < steps, use paragraph format: step.continue. 4. Import the formats from the generated Fm files into the component templates. TIP: I usually put my component templates in an Fm book, which makes it a bit easier to import formats. This video also gives you an idea of how the process goes: http://goo.gl/xGTpD Kind regards Yves Barbion www.scripto.nu
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