Forced return (linefeed), non-breaking hyphens and spaces, suppress hyphenation.
None of these are preserved when exporting from FrameMaker to XML, since they do not seem to be represented by a Unicode code point. My question to you is: How do you deal with those things in XML?
The last issues (non-breaking and suppress hyphen) have recently been brought up in:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/450363
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/459503
Forced return is a common thing in many FrameMaker documents to improve readability of certain phrases.
For export of FM to XML, there have been proposals to use a special element with a prefix just to capture the special FrameMaker symbol. It works, and may be a valid useful path in certain cases, but I think that it is a questionable way of dealing with it for several reasons:
- It is only relevant for roundtrip, since these special elements will hardly be interpreted by other XML tools, which of course limits the value of XML export.
- It is unwieldy, to say the least, to require the user to insert special elements for saying simple things that otherwise are just natural key strokes in the regular text flow, and which are not perceived as structural elements of information. Most users would think of these symbols/charactes as control characters, and there is no validation warning that says you may not use these characters/symbols.
- An element is used for formatting purposes only, whereas all other elements are used for content or structure.
- There is no automatic way of transforming an existing text that has these "symbols" into some special element when a document is structured with a conversion table.
- There is no automatic way of transforming a structured FM document to XML such that these special "symbols" get translated to some suitable XML construct.
If the last point could be solved, i.e if all those control characters or markers could automatically be translated to a suitable XML representation, then I would consider the whole issue as solved, otherwise not.
Even without FrameMaker, how do people deal with these things in "pure xml". For instance, when XML is used for publishing (which I know Arnis Gubins is doing), there will guaranteed be a need to control both hyphenation and line breaks. So how do you (they) do that?
How do other vendors cope with these issues, e.g XPP?