The DITA-FMx “Book from Map” command lets you create
a PDF-ready FrameMaker book from a DITA map or bookmap.
One of the primary reasons to use FrameMaker
as a DITA authoring tool is its ability to easily create high quality
PDFs. DITA-FMx provides the “Generate Book from Map” command which
gives you a high degree of control over most aspects of the map-to-book processing.
The “Setting up Book Builds” topic in the DITA-FMx online Help provides
all of the information you need to prepare for this processing.
Generating a book from XDocs-sourced content requires two additional
steps:
- Specify
the DITA-XDFMx-Book structure application as the “Book” structure
application in the DITA-FMx Options dialog.
- Set a value for the
“href_prefix” variable in the cms-prefix.xsl file
to match your “checkout directory” (as defined in the Configure
Servers dialog box in the XDocs Explorer). The cms-prefix.xsl file
is in the DITA-XDFMx-Book application directory (typically FrameMaker/Structure/xml/DITA-XDFMx-Book/Book).
Once this has been done, follow these steps:
- Download all of the files in the book (map, topic, and image
files) to the local file system. The easiest way to do this is to
use the Download command in the XDocs Explorer, and select the folder
that contains the files. If your book contains references to files
in multiple folders, make sure to download those files as well.
- Open the root map file using the Get File command on the XDocs
menu.
- Choose Generate Book from Map on the DITA-FMx menu. You will
be prompted for a location for the new book file. It is best to
select a location outside of the XDocs checkout directory.
- After the book file has been created, review the files for proper
numbering, pagination and setup. If everything looks good, use the
Save As PDF command to create a PDF of your book.
Remember that the book and FM files that are generated by this
process are not intended to be edited. You should always make edits
to the source DITA files and regenerate the book. Any edits or modifications
you make to the generated FM files will be lost the next time you
build the book.
However, you can add new files to the book such as a title page
or other unstructured content. The next time you generate a book,
you’ll just need to add that unstructured content back into the
book, but you won’t have to recreate it.