Single Source Diary - Day 3 Preamble

This is the third day of my project to convert two books and two help systems about a single product into a single source project using Flare 4.

True Confessions:
So I ignored the sage advice I got about importing from Sharon Burton to "let it rip and then set up the formats you want in Flare. Then throw out the Frame files you imported and use the CSS you did in Flare for all future imports."

Well I had reasons, and Sharon was mainly answering my question about CCS styles, and not a word was said about Page Layouts, which is what I am currently working on.

But I kinda felt guilty about not trying it. So this morning I did an import of the frontmatter document, and as I suspected, and as happened in earlier Flare versions, the result looked good text-wise, but Flare ignored the master page formats, graphics, and text. The book title starts at the very top of page 1, though it is correctly right justified.

Flare documents this on page 23 of their hopefully titled "T r a n s i t i o n F r o m F r a m e M a k e r G u i d e" (it looks better on their cover page) . "Master pages from FrameMaker are not converted in Flare. You need to re-create them as page layouts." For those of us with templates that include text and graphic material, this also means import by hand, and resize by hand.

(As vaguely demonstrated in yesterday's blob, Flare does allow you to include this material in their Page Layouts, so if you have used Frame Master Pages, you do not have to rethink your templates; you can create elements in your Flare Page Layouts that serve much the same functions.)

But overall, the import went well, and it was mightly speedy. Next I added the frontmatter.htm to the TOC that was created by default, and edited its properties to set the page layout to Title, and built the PDF target. I ended up with a valid PDF with decent frontmatter, but to duplicate the look of the Framemaker frontmatter, I will need to go back and design the Title page layout, just like I did the day before. What I will probably do instead is take the best of both projects and combine them - in other words the character format definitions for the symbols, and anything else that looks better in the "let it rip" import.

What I will emphasize on the plus side is that the Flare import of the text within the frontmatter was rather better than my paste in attempt, mostly because it allowed me to map the superscript character style for the trademark and copyright symbols, and those ended up looking perfect. I did it by hand in my version, and the first attempt was ... not perfect. In fact, it was yukky in-line formatting that I intend to throw away today.

So after all that, Sharon was right, but that there is potentially layout work that Flare cannot do for you.