Switching Between DITA-FMx and FM-DITA

If needed, you can easily switch between DITA-FMx and the built-in FM-DITA support.

For testing purposes, you may want to alternate between DITA-FMx and the built-in FrameMaker DITA support. Fundamentally, this is very simple to do, and if you do this frequently, there are things you can do to make it even easier.

All that is required to switch between these two DITA plugins is to update the maker.ini file. When you installed DITA-FMx, you should have commented out the lines that initialize the default DITA support. To enable the default support and disable DITA-FMx, just uncomment the “ditafm” lines and comment out the “ditafmx” lines. Then to switch back to DITA-FMx just do the reverse. Of course, each time you modify the maker.ini file you’ll ned to restart FrameMaker to initialize the alternate plugin.

Important: Before modifying the maker.ini file you should make a backup and keep it in a safe place.

You may want to set up the maker.ini file so it’s easy to make this change. Just move the lines to the end of the APIClients section and add some comments to look like this:

; Default FM2019-DITA 
;ditafm=Standard, Translation client for DITA, fminit\ditafm.dll, structured
;ditafm_app=Standard, Translation client for DITA, fminit\ditafm_app.dll, structured
;Dita OT=Standard, DITA OT client for DITA, fminit\openToolkit.dll, structured

; DITA-FMx 
ditafmx=Standard, ditafmx, DITA-FMx-2\ditafmx_150.dll, structured
ditafmx_app=Standard, ditafmx_app, DITA-FMx-2\ditafmx_150_app.dll, structured

This way you can easily add or remove the semicolon to comment or uncomment the appropriate lines.

One additional step that will streamline this process is to change the FM-DITA entry for “ditafm_app” to “ditafmx_app,” then make the same change in the structure application definitions file (change “ditafm_app” to “ditafmx_app” in the UseApiClient entries). This won’t change the functionality of the FM-DITA import/export client, it just means that you can use the same structure application for both plugins and you won’t have to edit the structapps file each time you switch. If you call them both “ditafmx_app,” then when you install an update of DITA-FMx, it will be an easier installation.

Leximation provides a plugin called IniSwitcher that modifies specified lines in an INI file from a command within FrameMaker. This plugin was specifically developed to make it easy to switch between the DITA authoring plugins. If you are interested in using this plugin, check www.leximation.com/tools or contact Leximation for more information.