Adobe FrameMaker has been on the market for many years with a strong user community in all technical publications markets. The Defence market is no exception where it is used in both unstructured and structured ways, originally supporting SGML based S1000D and more recently supporting XML based S1000D. Many users can also be found in the Aerospace sector and civil aircraft manufacturing where iSpec 2200 is the default standard for documentation. With both of these standards, plug-ins and templates are required to help the user create documents to the desired output and products such as Mekon Eclipse S1000D and Eclipse iSpec 2200 are designed to help achieve this. However, customers using these tools still benefit from a sound grounding in the underlying FrameMaker application underneath and will certainly see more productivity if they have full understanding of FrameMaker.
Working with documents and books, Structured or Un-structured
At the entry level Mekon offers course on working with unstructured or structured documents. These two separate courses cover similar requirements focusing on the needs of authors who plan to use the functions and templates provided to them but have less need to develop new structures or templates.
Template Design Workshop
Once the user understand how to work with existing documents and templates the natural progression is to learn more about how the templates are constructed in FrameMaker and how to build styles and page layouts from scratch. The Template Design course addresses this and when taken as a closed customised course can involve working with your own documents and potential new designs giving you a fast track to building your own templates.
Preparing EDDs
Its becoming more an more popular for Adobe FrameMaker users to want to work in a structured was to increase the usability and strict control available in the product. In order to do this you first need to build an Element Document Definition EDD unless you have purchased templates or an application like Eclipse S1000D an Eclipse iSpec 2200 which includes all the required EDDs.
Importing and Exporting SGML or XML
For clients that have chosen to use Adobe FrameMaker in a structured way you may have chosen to use SGML or XML as the underlying standard to base your structure on. In such a situation you will most certainly want to know how to import and export content in these formats from your FrameMaker documents. You will learn how to import and export elements, attributes and attribute values and how to refine the handling of all object types, in particular graphics and tables.
