Conversion Table Development

Tips and guidance on creating conversion tables.

The fundamental concepts of setting up a conversion table are fairly basic, but actually doing so can be quite time consuming and complex. The best place to find all of the details on this process is the Structure Application Developer’s Guide from Adobe. Not much has changed over the years on this subject, so you should be able to use most any version of this document with any version of FrameMaker. With FM7.2, this PDF was installed in the OnlineManuals folder, for later versions you’ll have to locate it online. Just search for the document title.

The FM2DITA preconversion commands are used before applying the conversion table, but two commands, Retag Paras and Retag Tables in Paras, will affect the way the conversion table is developed. The FM2DITA sample files include a sample conversion table, we recommend that you take a look at this conversion table, so you’ll be familiar with a simple, but functional conversion table.