advice on FrameMaker-to-HTML tools, please
Mark I Halpern
Colleagues,
My company, Tesseract Corporation, generates its documentation
(thousands of pages of it) using FrameMaker 5.1, and distributes it to
its customers via CD, with each CD including a general index and
search engine from Adobe.
We now wish to send our customers these documents in HTML form, so
that they can mount the CDs on their internal servers, and make them
available to all their employees via their intranets. I should add
that many of our customers tailor our software to their special needs,
and want to modify the documentation files we supply them to reflect
those modifications.
We have started looking at products that seem appropriate to help
with the FrameMaker=>HTML conversions -- so far we have identified
Adobe's "Hot Tamale," InfoAccess' "HTML Transit," Quadralay's
"WebWorks Publisher 3.0," and Harlequin's "WebMaker"; are there any
others that we should be considering? Has anyone any experience with
the task I've described, or any products that help with that task?
Any advice and pointers you can offer will be appreciated.
Mark Halpern
Project Manager
Tesseract Corporation
475 Sansome Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
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Tim Altom
At 03:46 PM 9/26/96 PST, you wrote:
> Colleagues,
>
> My company, Tesseract Corporation, generates its documentation
> (thousands of pages of it) using FrameMaker 5.1, and distributes it to
> its customers via CD, with each CD including a general index and
> search engine from Adobe.
> We have started looking at products that seem appropriate to help
> with the FrameMaker=>HTML conversions -- so far we have identified
> Adobe's "Hot Tamale," InfoAccess' "HTML Transit," Quadralay's
> "WebWorks Publisher 3.0," and Harlequin's "WebMaker"; are there any
> others that we should be considering? Has anyone any experience with
> the task I've described, or any products that help with that task?
>
> Any advice and pointers you can offer will be appreciated.
Simply put, nothing does 100% if you're looking for sparkling HTML. You'll
have to hand-code a few things.
That said, WebWorks is expensive but extremely powerful. Almost equally
powerful is Harlequin's WebMaker, but WebMaker has the wonderful addition of
an already-built set of rules that it uses to guess the HTML, if that's what
you want. You can change the rules, although it takes a little programming
expertise. With Quadralay's WebWorks you have to set rules up before you can
translate.
No tool is intuitive, like a word processor. And no tool is simply a filter.
You'll have to do a lot of testing and setup. That's people are coming to
vendors like me to do the preliminary work, and often the production, too.
Are you still going to distribute via CD? That's a viable option, you know.
CD authors are moving in that direction.
Tim Altom
Vice President, Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882 (voice) 317.899.5987 (fax)
FrameMaker support ForeHelp support
FrameMaker-to-HTML Conversions
HTML Help Consulting and Production
http://www.simplywritten.com/simply