Today we discovered XSH, an open source, interactive command line environment for querying and manipulating XML documents. Given its XML orientation it’s primarily of interest to XML users, and thus users of Structured Framemaker, but those who fall into that category and who have a little Unix shell programming experience should find ways to put it to good use.
I’ve always been irked by the fact that Framemaker doesn’t actually primarily manage structured documents as XML– a legacy, I believed, of Frame’s long history as a non-structured documentation editor predating SGML and XML.
Some months back, when faced with a problem of batch processing title pages on a set of manuals, I thumped my head for several days against how to best perform the needed changes at the XML level and then to script converting XML back to Framemaker using only the FDK (sorry, no Framescript for me). Then someone reminded me that MIF was always an option…
FrameAC brings the power of the Framemaker FDK APIs to any language on the Windows platform that can call COM objects (which is just about any language on Windows, really: Visual Basic, VB Script, Javascript… you name it). It will also be upgraded shortly to support the .Net languages, like C# and VB.Net, so you can call it from managed code. It should integrate with other applications and languages far better than the venerable FrameScript language.
19 Jan 07
Framemaker 8 Features Wish List
Adobe says Framemaker 8 (assuming that’s the final version) will come along sometime this year, so it’s probably a bit late to get in comments on the feature wish list, but you might want to check out Adobe’s Framemaker Forum to see what people are asking for. I’m sure Adobe read this closely.
What I would like to see, apart from better access to Frame on Windows from scripting languages like vbscript and/or perl: some better way of managing the infinite number of little tool palettes that Frame requires you to have floating around… Something more like what Dreamweaver does, where the main editing window is in one area with other panes docked around the right and bottom, would be ideal.
My gut tells me that this is too much to ask, in terms of a re-architecting of the product, or at least of the user experience. But… one can hope.
One Mark Pease appears to have created, some years ago, a series of Perl modules for working with Framemaker:
- FrameMaker: Top level FrameMaker interface
- FrameMaker::Control: Control a FrameMaker session
- FrameMaker::FDK: Interface to Adobe FDK
- FrameMaker::MIF: Parse and Manipulate FrameMaker MIF files
These appear to be tremendously useful… at least potentially. But, alas, they seem to have been orphaned, and are no longer available on CPAN.
If anyone has these, or has experience working with them, please post comments with where they can be found, or at least whether they worked.
I’ve occasionally felt inspired to try to take on something like this myself, though I probably wouldn’t go the open source or freeware route.
The Web is full of pages that refer to fmPython, a scripting environment that allows you to script Framemaker operations using the popular Python programming language and
We like this idea– anything that exposes significant FDK functionality but allows access through scripting languages increases people’s ability to adapt Framemaker to their needs and exploit the full capabilities of the software.
However, we can’t find fmPython any more…
We visited http://www.isnet.sk/petrucha/?lang=en&page=scripts, the URL where fmPython is supposed to be hosted, and were greeted with:
Chyba 404 - požadovaná stránka neexistuje
My Slovak’s kinda shaky, but 404 means pretty much the same thing in any language… fmPython’s gone missing.
If anyone out there can provide a working link to a current home for fmPython, we’ll add it to our web site. (In fact, we’d be perfectly willing to host and redistribute fmPython, if someone can provide a copy of the last version.)