Assumptions and requirements for effective use of FM2DITA.
FM2DITA is a plugin that provides commands and utilities that assist with the process of converting unstructured FrameMaker documents into DITA. It is not a magic bullet that does everything for you (if that’s what you’re looking for, hire a consultant). If used properly, it will allow you to establish a reliable and consistent conversion process and will save you a significant amount of time.
The following list describes the additional tools (both software and mental) that will likely be required to make effective use of this plugin.
FrameMaker. Version 7.2 or later.
DITA support in FrameMaker. We recommend that you use DITA-FMx to provide DITA support in FrameMaker (all versions), but you can use this plugin with the default DITA support as well.
Conversion table development expertise. This plugin assumes that you have developed a conversion table that does the initial conversion from unstructured FM files to structured FM files. FM2DITA does provide “preconversion” tools and utilities that you may want to use before applying the conversion table, but it does not create the conversion table for you. If you do not have conversion table development expertise, you can have this created for you by a consultant, and you’ll be able to use this plugin to perform the remainder of the conversion yourself.
DITA Open Toolkit or other validation tools. After completing the conversion process and breaking the structured FM files into DITA topics and maps, it is often useful to have a command line tool that you can run to do a quick sanity check validation on the resulting files. This is not required, but will help to find any problems that might become evident later.