ENLASO

Location: Language Services: Consulting & Training Services: FrameMaker Optimization

FrameMaker is the most popular desktop publishing application for generating large technical documents. As a result, nearly 80% of the document pages ENLASO localizes are in FrameMaker. Although alternative XML publishing solutions are gaining some ground in the market, FrameMaker remains the market leader in high-volume, complex, multi-channel technical document publishing. Due to years of experience in this field, ENLASO is expert at FrameMaker consulting and FrameMaker training.

FrameMaker is so popular because of its seemingly limitless set of feature combinations. This functionality comes with a cost of complexity: often there are four or five ways to accomplish the same result. In many instances, one method works better for localization, helping to reduce costs. Knowing the right way to do things in FrameMaker, from the localization perspective, is an easy way to save money in the long run.

ENLASO has published hundreds of challenging multi-lingual FrameMaker projects with very strict format and output specifications. We can use this expertise to assist you in three main ways:

1. Developing customer-specific FrameMaker plug-ins
2. Developing your customer-specific structured FrameMaker application
3. Developing customer-specific FrameMaker production practices

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Customer-specific FrameMaker plug-ins

The FrameMaker Developer Kit (FDK) enables developers to invoke any combination of FrameMaker features or functions. Because the kit accesses program calls that are not tied directly to the "out-of-the-box" user interface, it is actually possible to increase product functionality.

ENLASO has developed a number of powerful, customer-specific plug-in enhancements to FrameMaker, especially for structured (XML) FrameMaker. Any of these plug-ins may be easily modified to match your document structure and needs.

The following list highlights just a few of the more dramatic plug-ins we have developed so far:

• Localize Template plug-in

  Benefit: use one master, English template instead of 12 target language templates. Template maintenance is greatly reduced, saving time and localization costs. Automatically localizes a single source (English) template to any target language:

  • Prefix text (auto number format) in any affected paragraphs (e.g. "Figure" and "Table").
  • Text in variables (e.g. Manual Title in page footer).
  • Text in cross references, e.g. "For more information, see xxx located on page xxx."
  • Changes strings on "IX" Reference Page to change sort order of the generated index.
  • Changes indents/tabs in the Table of Contents for language expansion
  • Create the necessary combo-font definitions for Asian publishing.
  • For languages that have non-western character sets (e.g. Japanese, Greek, Hungarian), all fonts in all paragraph and character tag definitions are changed.
  • Change indent and tab settings for "hanging indent" paragraphs (e.g. "Example" followed by tab and indented text), to accommodate text expansion.

• Chapter attributes in variables

  Benefit: use one template instead of 24, streamlining the localization process.

  • One customer’s project required over two dozen combinations of variable definitions for running headers and footers. Rather than maintain a template specific to each project, one “master” template was developed with a generic set of user system variables. Attributes, doctypes and part number variables in the [chapter] element are automatically “stuffed” into the system variable definitions with this plug-in. Publishers never have to visit master pages to make these updates.

• Automatically created book or chapter level structured Tables of Contents

  Benefit: if you had to generate TOCs for 17 chapters, and for 11 languages, it would take over 30 hours. With this plug-in, the process would take about 30 minutes, resulting in substantial cost savings.

  • In structured FrameMaker, you cannot create a proper XML-structured document in one step, out-of-the-box. Once a TOC is generated, the document must go through a conversion table to become structured, and then have the appropriate EDD imported for proper formatting. Creating a chapter-relative TOC can take up to 10 minutes per instance. This plug-in makes book and chapter relative TOCs in about one minute. Multiplying this time-saving by each localized language can result in dramatically reduced publishing timelines and costs.

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Developing customer-specific structured FrameMaker applications

Many customers are ready to migrate from basic FrameMaker to structured FrameMaker in order to experience the benefits of XML publishing. Although any advanced FrameMaker user can learn how to do this, good instincts and considerable bandwidth are required for the initial transition into XML.

With our extensive experience in high-volume documentation projects in structured FrameMaker, ENLASO can create your structured application with the appropriate use of document attributes to maximize productive localization. Customer self-sufficiency is built into this process. Creation of the structured application includes staff training and documentation to ensure that your content creators know all of the steps, so that your designated staff can update and maintain the application.

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Developing customer-specific FrameMaker practices

It is not always easy to know the best way to create specific content in FrameMaker. Our consultants can perform thorough document analysis to identify where there is room for improvement. For example, FrameMaker users often use tables to achieve desired formatting results. Tables, though, are subject to page-break issues when they are localized because the text within the tables expands when translated. We can show you more appropriate formatting techniques to better plan for text expansion issues.

We can also identify the specific FrameMaker features to fit within the workload availability of your publishers. Custom training is available to document best practices and ensure that you have attained self-sufficiency in effectively designing new content that is suitable for localization.

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ENLASO's FrameMaker Consulting and Training Solutions

For more information on how ENLASO can assist you with all of your localization needs, please contact us at Contact@enlaso.com, call 303.516.0857 x127, or complete the quote request form.

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