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In this book, we explain the tools and techniques for converting FrameMaker documents to HTML. Audience We have written this book for practitioners who are helping to lead their organizations into the World Wide Web. If you are such a person, you may have a lot of learning to do-about the design of web pages, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the array of tools available, the process of converting existing printed documents to HTML, and the issues that arise with graphics on the Web. This book covers these topics specifically for FrameMaker users who want to publish FrameMaker documents in the format of the World Wide Web. FrameMaker users include writers, designers, production staff, researchers, computer programmers, scientists, professors, publishers, information managers, and webmasters. Although FrameMaker users have a variety of professions, we call them writers in this book for simplicity. Traditionally, writers provide information in printed documents, whereas web authors provide information in HTML. Web authors are responsible for determining the content and for representing that content well in HTML. This book helps people to make the transition successfully from writer to web author. Long, complex documents People who have chosen FrameMaker as their desktop publishing tool usually work on documents of significant length and complexity, because FrameMaker is ideally suited for handling such documents. When you are converting long documents, you do a kind of work that is different from when you are dealing with one- or two-page documents. You can imagine learning the basics of HTML and using an ordinary text editor or an HTML authoring tool to convert one or two pages by hand. However, when you have even a ten-page document, that technique is no longer manageable. If you have a 100-page document, you need a good conversion tool. This book concentrates on the needs of people who handle long and complex documents. In particular, we aim to automate the conversion process as much as possible, and we help you create web documents that are readable and easily navigated by the web readers. Legacy documents We focus on the situation where a document already exists-or possibly a large set of legacy documents already exists-and you need to publish those documents on the World Wide Web, on an intranet, or on a CD-ROM in HTML format. In this situation, you may not have the luxury of editing the FrameMaker sources due to the volume of documents. You need to automate the conversion process as much as possible. New documents for paper and web The conversion approach has benefits even for documents that have not yet been written. If you know that you must provide the new documents in both high-quality web and printed forms, conversion is an excellent approach. You can create the document in FrameMaker, and use that application's powerful formatting capabilities to provide the printed copies. You then convert that FrameMaker document to HTML using the tools and techniques described in this book. The advantage of this approach is that you have one source document for both paper and web; you can easily update the source document in FrameMaker to produce a revised printed version, and can reconvert it to HTML to produce a revised web version. We discuss this approach in Chapter 4, The Single-Source Solution . Goals of this book The goals of this book are the following: To give you all the information that you need to publish your documents in HTML on the World Wide Web or on an intranet To help you understand other solutions related to web publishing, including Acrobat and SGML To help you evaluate FrameMaker-to-HTML conversion tools To describe specific techniques for maintaining a single source document that produces both a printed document and a web document To help you create web documents that present their content well, by being well organized, attractive, and easy to navigate Overview of the conversion process Some steps of the conversion process are purely mechanical (such as converting FrameMaker bullets into HTML bullets); conversion tools handle those steps. Creating a successful conversion process, however, requires more than just using a conversion tool; it requires thought, planning, and care-that is why we wrote this book. We want to guide web authors through the interesting parts of translation, to help them represent their documents well in HTML, and to reduce or eliminate the mechanical work required of the web author. Regardless of the conversion tool that you use, the overall process of converting a FrameMaker document to HTML is similar. We show the steps of the process in Figure P.1. Parts I through III of this book reflect the three major steps of the conversion process; the details of the conversion tools are postponed until Part IV. Step 1. Deciding on the Approach Learn how web books differ from home pages (Chapter 1) Learn the basics of conversion (Chapter 2) Learn about simultaneous paper and web publication (Chapter 3) Learn the advantages of a single-source solution (Chapter 4) Consider HTML, SGML, and Acrobat (Chapter 5) Choose a conversion tool (Chapters 6 and 17*22) Learn the basics of HTML (Chapter 7) Learn about Cascading Style Sheets (Chapter 8) Step 2. Planning and Designing Identify the goals of the web book (Chapter 9) Analyze the source document (Chapter 10) Design the navigation strategy (Chapter 11) Design the layout of the web pages (Chapter 12) Decide how to offer printed copies (Chapter 13) Step 3. Doing the Conversion Convert and debug the web book (Chapter 14) Handle any graphics issues (Chapter 15) Publish the web book (Chapter 16) Figure P.1 Major steps of the conversion process. Conversion tools In Part IV, we give tours of four popular conversion tools: WebMaker (from Harlequin), HoTaMaLe (from Adobe), WebWorks Publisher (from Quadralay), and HTML Transit (from InfoAccess). Most of the FrameMaker-to-HTML conversion tools use similar approaches. We work for Harlequin Incorporated, the vendor of the WebMaker conversion tool. We use WebMaker as an example in Chapter 2, Quick Start, and we provide an evaluation copy of WebMaker on a CD-ROM included with this book. Our goal, however, is to describe the overall conversion process for all FrameMaker users, using any conversion tool, and to that end we have described each tool as objectively as possible. Users of any FrameMaker-to-HTML conversion tool will find this book useful. Every conversion tool has its own documentation, which provides the necessary details of how to use the tool. Like any software product, conversion tools are continually updated, and their documentation is updated to reflect the changes. This book does not attempt to document any particular tool. CD-ROM provided with this book At the back of this book, you will find a CD-ROM containing WebMaker 3.0 software. This evaluation copy includes the complete software of WebMaker but no registration number. You can use the software on the CD-ROM without a registration number to experiment with WebMaker and to create the first five HTML pages from a FrameMaker file or book. You can purchase WebMaker for $99.00 per license by contacting Harlequin at http://www.harlequin.com/ . You will receive a registration number that will remove the five-page limitation on the WebMaker software. Conventions used in this book We use boldface type when we introduce new terms, such as web author . We use bold typewriter font for filenames, such as draft1.html , and for URLs, such as http://www.aw.com/. When we refer to a menu command in a program such as FrameMaker or a browser, such as the Save command in the File menu, we refer to it like this: File>Save . When we capitalize the word Web, we are referring to the World Wide Web. We use the word web in lowercase letters to refer to HTML-based technology that exists on the World Wide Web, intranets, and CD-ROMs. For example, a web author is a person who creates content in HTML, a web page is an HTML file, and a web book is a set of linked web pages that constitute the equivalent of a printed book. Creation of this printed book and web book We used FrameMaker to write and typeset this book. We used WebMaker to produce a web book that contains portions of this book. The web book is available at http://www.harlequin.com/ and http://www.aw.com/cseng/ . Cover image S. Randall McLamb created the image of the magician transforming a scarf from one color to another-our visual analogy of transforming FrameMaker into HTML. The magician is a character from commedia dellAarte, the street theater popular in the Italian Renaissance. His name is Harlequin. Acknowledgments We thank our reviewers for sharing their conversion experiences, pointing out tips and techniques, helping us to keep the tool comparison objective, and suggesting ways to shape this book so that it will be most useful for our readers. Paul Brady, John Clemens, Neal Dench, Hadar Hawk, Liz Hujsak, Dusty King, Jonathan Ostrowsky, Becky Spainhower, and David Williams reviewed this book. Neil Epstein, Sumner Saitz, and Sharon Van Gundy helped us with business issues that arose. S. Randall McLamb, Katerina Meister, and Craig Swanson shared their creativity regarding the cover image. S. Randall McLamb drew the illustrations within the book. Mark Wainwright wrote the Unofficial Guide for New Employees document used as an example in this book. David Earl created the photograph of the highland cow on the moor above Holmfirth, Yorkshire. Andy Edwards created the photograph of Barrington Hall in the snow; this historic building is Harlequin's Cambridge, England, office. We received excellent technical advice on the four converters we tested. Paul Butterfield of Harlequin helped with WebMaker. Lori DeFurio of Adobe helped with HoTaMaLe. The technical support staffs at Quadralay and InfoAccess helped with WebWorks Publisher and HTML Transit. For the third time, it has been a great pleasure working with Peter Gordon and Helen Goldstein at Addison Wesley Longman. Melissa Lima did fine production work on this book. Lyn Dupré copyedited this book and made suggestions regarding the content based on her own FrameMaker knowledge. Simone Payment designed the cover using the Harlequin image. Ellen Wohl did the marketing work. Finally, we thank Jo Marks for his ongoing encouragement and enthusiasm for our project of writing and publishing this book. 0201312042P04062001 Excerpted from Framemaker to HTML: Single-Source Solution for Paper and Web by Ken Jackson, Sonya E. Keene, Addison Wesley Higher Education Staff All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.