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Beyond Framemaker |
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Speaker: Robert A. Dickinson is a Product Architect at Xaffire, Inc. and founder of Reasonably Sane Inc. (www.rsane.com), which markets Rsane Publisher, an open source publishing system competing against Adobe FrameMaker.
RSane Publisher is software designed for teams of people working on large projects. It provides fully automated formatting for hands-free publishing. It is similar to Wiki, but uses a structured paradigm. (Wiki is used for collaborative publishing of Web sites.)
RSane Publisher is open source, written in Java; the source code is included with the application, and changes are allowed. It is distributed free of charge under Apache License 2.0.
Rob contrasted WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM: “What You See is What You Get” versus “What You See is What You Mean.” The two models are contrasted as follows:
WYSIWYG authoring |
WYSIWYM authoring |
Authoring and typesetting combined |
Compile source content into final documents |
Lightly automated, format specific |
Highly automated, portable content |
FrameMaker, Quark, MS Word |
RSane Publisher, Wiki, TeX |
The source files that comprise a publishing project are treated like “content assets.” Every project has a home page that lists that project’s content assets. All files and assets are served off a file server (computer). All entities with in the publishing project start with the “@” character—that is how you can recognize them. We saw several examples of how you can arrange various entities to form the different parts of a document. We also saw an example of how chapters can have sub-chapters. Essentially, however, documents are arranged like this: documents contain chapters and a glossary, chapters contain sections, glossaries contain keywords, and sections contain topics. A document also contains a list of entities which is roughly the equivalent of a Table of Contents.
Rob demonstrated inserting various entities using the button toolbar in the upper right of the authoring window. Rob published the project in any one of three formats: Web, print, or text, pointing out that the output transforms can be tweaked to adjust their characteristics; alternative output transforms may be added in the future.
RSane Publisher supports a feature called living versions; this refers to the ability the author has to use metadata to limit the scope of certain sections of the document. For example, one section could be intended for novice users, while another section could be intended solely for expert users.
RSane Publisher is in the first stages of development, and thus, it does not support the full range of publishing features that technical writers have come to expect. For example, at this time, RSane does not handle tables, and it does not handle indexing, either. Another limitation is that you cannot import existing documents as a “pushbutton operation”; you have to use copy-and-paste to bring in (import) the verbiage that you already have written.
At this time, the only graphics file format that RSane supports is PNG; however, Rob intends to add JPG and GIF formats in the next version that he releases.
For more information about RSane Publisher, visit www.rsane.com.
Notes written by Kathy Ramsey
Download: Beyond
Framemaker (PDF Format)
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