There may be times that you’ll want to include FrameMaker binary (.fm) files in a book that’s created by the Generate Book from Map command. One particular situation is for the addition of a title page but there may be other uses as well. For example, you may have content that you want to include in a book that has not yet been converted to DITA. With this feature you can build a book that contains some DITA-sourced chapters as well as some conventional, unstructured chapters.

DITA-FMx provides an “Include Files” feature that is implemented through the ditafmx-bookbuild.ini file. These files are added to the book at the beginning of the book-build process, just after the DITA files have been aggregated into FM files. To include FM files you’ll specify their file name and position in the book (where a position of “1” is the first file in the book). You can also optionally define a “mapelemtype” value to be associated with this file so you can control the pagination properties. To include a title page in the book as the first file and to define this as a type of “titlepage,” the following sections should be added to the ditafmx-bookbuild.ini file:

[IncludeFiles] 
1=title.fm 
 
[IncludeFileTypes] 
1=titlepage

The IncludeFiles section specifies the position and file name, where the file name is relative to the book file. You can specify that multiple files are added to the book, just make sure that the “position” values are always unique, and the files are ordered from the lowest position to the highest. The IncludeFileTypes section defines the “mapelemtype” value for the files at each position. You can use values that match those that are map element types in DITA (such as “chapter” or “appendix”) and you can create your own values (such as “titlepage”). Be sure to define the NumberingFirst and NumberingDefault sections as needed to assign numbering and pagination values to these mapelemtype values.