Single Source Diary - Day 4

Short and Sweet:
I took care of a bunch of smaller tasks.

• Created a TOC for the print version
• Created a print TOC topic
  
• Inserted a Print TOC Proxy that points to the Print TOC (but I left in the default formats).
• I imported the Preface Framemaker document, and begin tidying it up (but stopped because it cross referenced other chapters that were not yet chapterized).
• I imported the other two chapters that were not a part of the existing help project, and linked them into the Print TOC
• I built what I had done into PDF to survey the good and bad news. Lots of things worked just fine, but lots of aspects of our book design still remain to be applied.
  

Short Shameful Confession:
(Snort if you recognize that.)
I was so intent on adding the chapters that were part of the book to the project that I completely ignored the fact that Flare can import your book file and drag all the .fm files that are part of the book along with it.

In retrospect, I probably still would have done the import individually, because I already had the bulk of the information in Flare. But if you want to turn a book that has never seen Flare into a single source Flare project, importing the whole book might be your best choice.

I did this with a book, changed a couple of settings in the Target Printed Output tab, and did a build, and the result was a decent PDF (not publishable to fool anyone next to the previous PDF, but readable and not ugly). Ten minutes tops. Well, no TOC or Index, and Flare did not quite understand the role of chapter titles in our formats, and reference page graphics were nowhere to be found, but overall it looked pretty decent.

More later.